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The surprising winners — and losers — of America’s clean energy boom

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Monday, October 28, 2024

Two years ago, Congress passed the biggest climate bill in U.S. history — the Inflation Reduction Act, which spurred growth in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles across the country.Since then, money devoted to clean energy — initially estimated at $369 billion, but with the potential to reach up to $1 trillion — has flowed into almost every state, largely in the form of tax credits.But this gusher of cash has also created winners and losers, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the clean energy modeling think tank Rhodium Group.Here is how the Inflation Reduction Act has remade America over the past two years.A windfall for GOP districtsNot a single Republican lawmaker voted for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Since then, many of them have voted to repeal its clean energy provisions and criticized the law as a waste of taxpayer money.But red districts have emerged as the climate law’s biggest winners. According to The Post’s analysis, congressional districts that favored Trump in the 2020 election received three times as much clean energy and manufacturing investments as those that leaned toward Biden.Search or tap a bubble for district informationDistricts where a plurality of voters backed Trump have claimed around $165 billion of the cash so far, compared with just $54 billion in areas where Biden came in first. Of the top 10 districts that have attracted the most clean energy investments, nine are led by Republican lawmakers.The data from MIT and Rhodium’s Clean Investment Monitor tracks company announcements, third-party data sources and financial filings. Projects are entered into the database only when they have broken ground; projects that were announced and later canceled are not included.Some of the biggest beneficiaries of the law have pushed back the hardest against cutting planet-warming pollution and developing renewable energy. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), an outspoken critic of the law, called it “a failed liberal spending spree that crippled our economy” and last month introduced legislation to rename it the “Lied About Inflation and Energy Dependence Act.”Arrington’s office declined to comment on the record for this article. His district, which is ranked fifth in the country for clean energy and manufacturing investments, has received nearly $5 billion in investments since the law passed in mid-2022.Developers are drawn to red districts because land is plentiful and cheap, experts say.“Most of this can just be explained by population density,” said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium Group. In rural areas, which are much more likely to vote Republican, ample land — at lower prices — can support giant battery manufacturing plants or large-scale wind farms.Others point to red states’ low taxes and tax incentives for developers. “It’s natural that investors and project developers are wanting to go into areas where they’ve got a predictable business environment,” said Jeremy Harrell, the CEO of ClearPath, a conservative clean energy advocacy group. States like Tennessee, Georgia and Ohio, he said, have less regulatory red tape that could slow big energy projects.Remaking the countryMap showing investments in battery manufacturing since Aug. 16, 2022.As money pours into Republican districts, it has also moved into specific regions — creating new centers of industry across the country.The South, for example, hosts around 38 percent of America’s population, but has received almost half of clean energy investments so far. In the Southeast, battery manufacturing companies have built factories alongside EV assembly lines, creating a so-called “Battery Belt” for electric vehicles that stretches from Alabama and Georgia to North Carolina and Tennessee.Derrick Flakoll, policy associate for BloombergNEF, an energy research firm, points to Southern politicians’ willingness to offer generous incentives to encourage manufacturing growth. In North Carolina, for example, state and local leaders offered Toyota more than $400 million in incentives to construct and operate a giant lithium-ion battery factory in the city of Liberty.Southern states are also more likely to be “right-to-work” states, where union labor has less power; many also have cheap, clean power for factories’ many electricity demands. In Georgia, where Hyundai opened a new, $7.5 billion EV plant, the state has recently opened two new nuclear reactors.Maps showing investments in solar power and energy storage.In the West, particularly in California, developers have built new solar and storage projects, taking advantage of the ample sun and the state’s mandate to produce all of its electricity with clean energy by 2045. Texas has gotten an outsize portion of new solar and storage, thanks to the state’s flexible permitting rules and wide-open spaces.The Midwest has also seen growth in battery manufacturing, piggybacking on the region’s automotive industry. Developers are also working on sustainable aviation fuels in the region, close to the Corn Belt, which can provide feedstocks for those fuels.But clean-energy companies have largely avoided one area: the Northeast. With dense city centers, the region — which has 17 percent of the United States’ population — has just 4 percent of the clean energy investments so far. While many Northeast states have opportunities for offshore wind, that sector has slowed in recent years.An uneven energy boomClean energy spending has skyrocketed since the IRA became law, up 85 percent compared with the preceding two years. Some technologies — like battery manufacturing, sustainable aviation fuels and carbon capture — have surged, going from almost no investment to tens of billions of dollars. Experts say that without the new funding, it’s difficult to imagine those sectors taking off.Where the IRA is creating momentumBattery manufacturingSustainable aviation fuelOthers, like solar power and large battery storage, have continued on a trajectory that started long before the IRA passed. Solar power installations, for example, more than doubled between 2017 and 2021, from around 10 gigawatts to 23 gigawatts. “Those were already on a takeoff trajectory because of pre-IRA cost declines,” Houser said.Where the IRA is accelerating existing trendsSolar powerEnergy storageStill, one technology has struggled. Wind power investment has halved in the past two years.“The IRA made wind investment more attractive,” Houser added. “But it hasn’t been sufficient to overcome the other headwinds wind power is facing.”Stagnating technologiesWind powerNuclear powerDevelopers of offshore wind have faced challenging supply chain bottlenecks, as companies struggle to build and ship the giant turbines. Grassroots opposition from beach towns across the Eastern Seaboard has also thrown a wrench in plans for wind farms. Many offshore wind projects planned by the Biden administration have been canceled.Onshore, in the wind-rich Midwest and Great Plains, developers are facing similar issues: locals who don’t want views obstructed by wind turbines, and difficulty getting permits and permission to connect to the larger electricity grid.Sandhya Ganapathy, chief executive of EDP Renewables North America, says that most of the “low-hanging fruit” — the best sites for wind power in the United States — have already been built out. Wind power had a significant head start compared with other renewables — by 2019, the United States already had over 100 gigawatts of wind, compared with just 76 gigawatts of solar.“The reality is also that wind requires almost seven, eight, nine times the land that you need when compared to solar,” Ganapathy added. That means developers have to acquire more land — and consult with many local residents who could be affected by the sight or sound of wind turbines.Without progress on wind, the United States will struggle to meet its climate goal to cut its greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by 2035, compared with 2005 levels.Despite its major economic impact, the law’s future remains in doubt. Most experts say it’s unlikely that a future Congress will repeal it outright, even under a Republican sweep. In August, 18 Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), urging him not to “prematurely” repeal any of the tax credits that companies have come to rely on.Some also worry that the struggle to get permits and access to the larger electricity grid is hampering the law, limiting the number of projects that can tap the law’s tax benefits. While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pushed for permitting reform, they have yet to reach an agreement.The next president and Congress might be tempted to divert unspent IRA funds to other priorities, warned James L. Connaughton, who led the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President George W. Bush.“The IRA, in my view, is at extreme risk,” he said in an interview.The law also includes grants that could be scaled back by a future administration. According to an analysis by Atlas Public Policy, the law has $33 billion in grants that have yet to be doled out, on top of hundreds of billions of dollars in potential tax credits.“The clean energy investments are not ‘Trump-proof,’” said Joanna Slaney, associate vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund. “But it is an indication of how well it is working that we are seeing people step forward and say, ‘These are the benefits in my community.’”MethodologyThe Post’s analysis included only investments in the energy, industry and manufacturing sectors. It excluded retail investments in clean technologies, such as individuals purchasing EVs.Time series of quarterly investments and the bubble chart showing the partisan split in investments refer to estimated actual investments over time. The maps in the article show the size of announced investments with no adjustment for how these would be spread out over time.Eight percent of investments could not be tied to specific congressional districts by Rhodium and are excluded from the bubble chart showing the partisan split in investments.The Post analyzed precinct-level 2020 presidential election result data provided by Decision Desk HQ and assigned each precinct to a district of the 118th Congress based on its location. This analysis was done by Lenny Bronner.

Most of the clean investment since Biden’s landmark climate law has flowed to Republican districts.

Two years ago, Congress passed the biggest climate bill in U.S. history — the Inflation Reduction Act, which spurred growth in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles across the country.

Since then, money devoted to clean energy — initially estimated at $369 billion, but with the potential to reach up to $1 trillion — has flowed into almost every state, largely in the form of tax credits.

But this gusher of cash has also created winners and losers, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the clean energy modeling think tank Rhodium Group.

Here is how the Inflation Reduction Act has remade America over the past two years.

A windfall for GOP districts

Not a single Republican lawmaker voted for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Since then, many of them have voted to repeal its clean energy provisions and criticized the law as a waste of taxpayer money.

But red districts have emerged as the climate law’s biggest winners. According to The Post’s analysis, congressional districts that favored Trump in the 2020 election received three times as much clean energy and manufacturing investments as those that leaned toward Biden.

Search or tap a bubble for district information

Districts where a plurality of voters backed Trump have claimed around $165 billion of the cash so far, compared with just $54 billion in areas where Biden came in first. Of the top 10 districts that have attracted the most clean energy investments, nine are led by Republican lawmakers.

The data from MIT and Rhodium’s Clean Investment Monitor tracks company announcements, third-party data sources and financial filings. Projects are entered into the database only when they have broken ground; projects that were announced and later canceled are not included.

Some of the biggest beneficiaries of the law have pushed back the hardest against cutting planet-warming pollution and developing renewable energy. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), an outspoken critic of the law, called it “a failed liberal spending spree that crippled our economy” and last month introduced legislation to rename it the “Lied About Inflation and Energy Dependence Act.”

Arrington’s office declined to comment on the record for this article. His district, which is ranked fifth in the country for clean energy and manufacturing investments, has received nearly $5 billion in investments since the law passed in mid-2022.

Developers are drawn to red districts because land is plentiful and cheap, experts say.

“Most of this can just be explained by population density,” said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium Group. In rural areas, which are much more likely to vote Republican, ample land — at lower prices — can support giant battery manufacturing plants or large-scale wind farms.

Others point to red states’ low taxes and tax incentives for developers. “It’s natural that investors and project developers are wanting to go into areas where they’ve got a predictable business environment,” said Jeremy Harrell, the CEO of ClearPath, a conservative clean energy advocacy group. States like Tennessee, Georgia and Ohio, he said, have less regulatory red tape that could slow big energy projects.

Remaking the country

Map showing investments in battery manufacturing since Aug. 16, 2022.

As money pours into Republican districts, it has also moved into specific regions — creating new centers of industry across the country.

The South, for example, hosts around 38 percent of America’s population, but has received almost half of clean energy investments so far. In the Southeast, battery manufacturing companies have built factories alongside EV assembly lines, creating a so-called “Battery Belt” for electric vehicles that stretches from Alabama and Georgia to North Carolina and Tennessee.

Derrick Flakoll, policy associate for BloombergNEF, an energy research firm, points to Southern politicians’ willingness to offer generous incentives to encourage manufacturing growth. In North Carolina, for example, state and local leaders offered Toyota more than $400 million in incentives to construct and operate a giant lithium-ion battery factory in the city of Liberty.

Southern states are also more likely to be “right-to-work” states, where union labor has less power; many also have cheap, clean power for factories’ many electricity demands. In Georgia, where Hyundai opened a new, $7.5 billion EV plant, the state has recently opened two new nuclear reactors.

Maps showing investments in solar power and energy storage.

In the West, particularly in California, developers have built new solar and storage projects, taking advantage of the ample sun and the state’s mandate to produce all of its electricity with clean energy by 2045. Texas has gotten an outsize portion of new solar and storage, thanks to the state’s flexible permitting rules and wide-open spaces.

The Midwest has also seen growth in battery manufacturing, piggybacking on the region’s automotive industry. Developers are also working on sustainable aviation fuels in the region, close to the Corn Belt, which can provide feedstocks for those fuels.

But clean-energy companies have largely avoided one area: the Northeast. With dense city centers, the region — which has 17 percent of the United States’ population — has just 4 percent of the clean energy investments so far. While many Northeast states have opportunities for offshore wind, that sector has slowed in recent years.

An uneven energy boom

Clean energy spending has skyrocketed since the IRA became law, up 85 percent compared with the preceding two years. Some technologies — like battery manufacturing, sustainable aviation fuels and carbon capture — have surged, going from almost no investment to tens of billions of dollars. Experts say that without the new funding, it’s difficult to imagine those sectors taking off.

Where the IRA is creating momentum

Battery manufacturing

Sustainable aviation fuel

Others, like solar power and large battery storage, have continued on a trajectory that started long before the IRA passed. Solar power installations, for example, more than doubled between 2017 and 2021, from around 10 gigawatts to 23 gigawatts. “Those were already on a takeoff trajectory because of pre-IRA cost declines,” Houser said.

Where the IRA is accelerating existing trends

Solar power

Energy storage

Still, one technology has struggled. Wind power investment has halved in the past two years.

“The IRA made wind investment more attractive,” Houser added. “But it hasn’t been sufficient to overcome the other headwinds wind power is facing.”

Stagnating technologies

Wind power

Nuclear power

Developers of offshore wind have faced challenging supply chain bottlenecks, as companies struggle to build and ship the giant turbines. Grassroots opposition from beach towns across the Eastern Seaboard has also thrown a wrench in plans for wind farms. Many offshore wind projects planned by the Biden administration have been canceled.

Onshore, in the wind-rich Midwest and Great Plains, developers are facing similar issues: locals who don’t want views obstructed by wind turbines, and difficulty getting permits and permission to connect to the larger electricity grid.

Sandhya Ganapathy, chief executive of EDP Renewables North America, says that most of the “low-hanging fruit” — the best sites for wind power in the United States — have already been built out. Wind power had a significant head start compared with other renewables — by 2019, the United States already had over 100 gigawatts of wind, compared with just 76 gigawatts of solar.

“The reality is also that wind requires almost seven, eight, nine times the land that you need when compared to solar,” Ganapathy added. That means developers have to acquire more land — and consult with many local residents who could be affected by the sight or sound of wind turbines.

Without progress on wind, the United States will struggle to meet its climate goal to cut its greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by 2035, compared with 2005 levels.

Despite its major economic impact, the law’s future remains in doubt. Most experts say it’s unlikely that a future Congress will repeal it outright, even under a Republican sweep. In August, 18 Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), urging him not to “prematurely” repeal any of the tax credits that companies have come to rely on.

Some also worry that the struggle to get permits and access to the larger electricity grid is hampering the law, limiting the number of projects that can tap the law’s tax benefits. While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pushed for permitting reform, they have yet to reach an agreement.

The next president and Congress might be tempted to divert unspent IRA funds to other priorities, warned James L. Connaughton, who led the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President George W. Bush.

“The IRA, in my view, is at extreme risk,” he said in an interview.

The law also includes grants that could be scaled back by a future administration. According to an analysis by Atlas Public Policy, the law has $33 billion in grants that have yet to be doled out, on top of hundreds of billions of dollars in potential tax credits.

“The clean energy investments are not ‘Trump-proof,’” said Joanna Slaney, associate vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund. “But it is an indication of how well it is working that we are seeing people step forward and say, ‘These are the benefits in my community.’”

Methodology

The Post’s analysis included only investments in the energy, industry and manufacturing sectors. It excluded retail investments in clean technologies, such as individuals purchasing EVs.

Time series of quarterly investments and the bubble chart showing the partisan split in investments refer to estimated actual investments over time. The maps in the article show the size of announced investments with no adjustment for how these would be spread out over time.

Eight percent of investments could not be tied to specific congressional districts by Rhodium and are excluded from the bubble chart showing the partisan split in investments.

The Post analyzed precinct-level 2020 presidential election result data provided by Decision Desk HQ and assigned each precinct to a district of the 118th Congress based on its location. This analysis was done by Lenny Bronner.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Australia, one of the world's biggest polluters per capita, will aim to cut its carbon emissions by at least 62% compared to 2005 levels over the next decade.The nation - which has faced global criticism for its continued reliance on fossil fuels - had previously pledged to reduce greenhouse gases by 43% by 2030."This is a responsible target supported by science and a practical plan to get there, built on proven technology," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said when unveiling the new target on Thursday.A landmark risk assessment commissioned by the government this week warned Australia faced a future of increasingly extreme weather conditions as a result of man-made climate change.Setting a target to reduce emissions from 2005 levels is part of Australia's obligation under the Paris Climate Agreement.The new target is in line with an emission reduction benchmark – of between 62% and 70% – that was recommended by the Climate Change Authority, a government body which provides climate policy advice, Albanese said.The prime minister will confirm the commitment at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York later this month.The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement saw world leaders agree to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5C above those of the late 19th Century, which is seen as crucial to preventing the most damaging impacts of climate change.Australia, like much of the world, has faced an increasing number of climate-related weather extremes in recent years including severe drought, historic bushfires and successive years of record-breaking floods.Warmer seas have also caused mass bleaching at its world-famous Great Barrier Reef in Queensland and Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. On Monday, a report into the impact of climate change - the first of its kind in the country - found Australia had already reached warming of above 1.5C and that no community would be immune from "cascading, compounding and concurrent" climate risks.It warned that if the government failed to take stronger action there would be more heatwave-related deaths, poorer water quality due to severe flooding and bushfires, and sea level rises that would threaten 1.5 million people. It also warned of a A$611bn ($406bn; £300bn) drop in property values as a result of such threats.However, Australia's climate agenda and its ambition to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 remain divisive political topics. The country's opposition party, the Liberal National coalition, is internally debating whether it should continue to support the net zero emissions goal, while other parliamentarians - including many independent and Greens MPs - are calling for faster cuts.Opposition leader Sussan Ley on Thursday said the coalition was "dead against" the new target, saying that it failed on both "cost and credibility".Shortly after Albanese's Labor government was elected in 2022 it set higher climate targets, up from the conservative coalition's previous target of between 26% and 28%.It has sought to make Australia a "renewable energy superpower", but has also continued to approve fossil fuel projects. Last week, one of the country's largest gas projects - Woodside's North West Shelf - was given the greenlight to keep operating for another 40 years until 2070, in a move that was widely condemned by climate experts and environmental advocates. Australian Greens Larissa Waters labelled the move a "betrayal" by Labor.

Climate
Energy
Government

Move Over, Green Lawns. Drier, Warmer Climate Boosts Interest in Low-Water Landscaping

America loves its green lawns

LITTLETON, Colo. (AP) — When Lena Astilli first bought her home outside of Denver, she had no interest in matching the wall-to-wall green lawns that dominated her block. She wanted native plants — the kind she remembered and loved as a child in New Mexico, that require far less water and have far more to offer insects and birds that are in decline.“A monoculture of Kentucky bluegrass is not helping anybody,” Astilli said. After checking several nurseries before finding one that had what she wanted, she has slowly been reintroducing those native plants to her yard.Though Astilli was replacing grass just last month, it remains ubiquitous in American yards. It's a tradition that began more than two centuries ago with the landed gentry copying the landscaping of Europe's wealthy, and grass now dominates as the familiar planting outside everything from single-family homes to apartment complexes to office parks and retail malls.“In the absence of simple directions and guidance about what to do with their landscape, they default to lawn because it’s easy,” said Mark Richardson, executive director of the Ecological Landscape Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable landscaping.Yet that grass is problematic in deserts and any place with limited water, such as the American West, where it won't do well without irrigation. As climate change makes the world hotter and triggers more extreme weather, including drought, thirsty expanses of groomed emerald are taxing freshwater supplies that are already under stress.Enter xeriscaping — landscaping aimed at vastly reducing the need for irrigation, including by using native or drought-tolerant plants. (A utility here, Denver Water, says it coined the term in 1981 by combining “landscape” with the Greek word “xeros,” which means dry, to encourage reduced water use.) Reasons to think about ripping up that lawn The average U.S. family uses 320 gallons (1,211 liters) of water every day, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Nearly a third of that is devoted to outdoor water use. 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US senators call on big oil to disclose lobbying that led Trump to axe key climate rule

Senate committee investigates suspected push that led administration to overturn EPA’s endangerment findingIn the wake of the Trump administration’s announcement that it will overturn the rule which underpins virtually all US climate regulations, a Senate committee has launched an investigation into a suspected lobbying push that led to the move.On Tuesday, the Senate environment and public works committee sent letters to two dozen corporations, including oil giants, thinktanks, law firms and trade associations. The missives request each company to turn over documents regarding the 2009 declaration, known as the endangerment finding, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said in July that it will unmake. Continue reading...

In the wake of the Trump administration’s announcement that it will overturn the rule which underpins virtually all US climate regulations, a Senate committee has launched an investigation into a suspected lobbying push that led to the move.On Tuesday, the Senate environment and public works committee sent letters to two dozen corporations, including oil giants, thinktanks, law firms and trade associations. The missives request each company to turn over documents regarding the 2009 declaration, known as the endangerment finding, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said in July that it will unmake.The finding enshrined that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases harm the health of Americans.“Rescinding the endangerment finding at the behest of industry is irresponsible, legally dubious, and deeply out of step with the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, and the American public deserves to understand your role in advancing EPA’s dangerous decision,” wrote Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the committee. “I am concerned about the role that fossil fuel companies, certain manufacturers, trade associations, polluter-backed groups, and others with much to benefit from the repeal of the endangerment finding – including your organization – played in drafting, preparing, promoting, and lobbying on the proposal.”Fossil fuel companies and their allies are threatened by the endangerment finding because it confirms in law that carbon dioxide, which their products produce, are dangerous, Whitehouse told the Guardian. It also gives the EPA the authority to regulate those emissions under the Clean Air Act.The letter, which asks for all relevant private communications between the day Trump was re-elected in November to the day the EPA announced plans to rescind the endangerment finding in July, was sent to oil giants Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP, as well as coal producers, a rail giant and two auto manufacturers, whose business plans rely on fossil fuels.“The only interests that benefit from undoing the endangerment finding are polluter interests, and specifically fossil fuel polluter interests,” Whitehouse said.It was also sent to trade associations and law firms representing big oil and auto companies. And it was sent to far-right, pro-fossil fuel thinktanks Competitive Enterprise Institute, New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Heartland Institute, America First Policy Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, each of which challenge the authority of federal agencies, and some of which have directly praised the proposed endangerment finding rollback.The Guardian has contacted each recipient for comment.Because Republicans control the Senate, Democrats on the environment and public works committee lack the power to subpoena the documents. But the Senate committee still expects the companies to comply with their request.The letter could send a signal to polluting sectors and rightwing firms that they are being watched, and could set the stage for continued investigation if Democrats win back a congressional chamber in next November’s midterm elections.Fossil fuel interests pushed back on the endangerment finding when it was first written, yet little is known about more recent advocacy to overturn it. Immediately following the EPA’s announcement of the rollback, the New York Times reported that groups have not “been clamoring in recent years for its reversal”. But Whitehouse believes that has changed since Trump was re-elected in November 2025.When Joe Biden was president and Democrats controlled at least one chamber of Congress, Whitehouse said “a request to rescind the endangerment finding would have just looked like useless, pointless, madness.“But now that they can actually do it in their desperation and with the mask of moderation pulled off, I think it’s very clear that they were directing this happen,” he said.Under Trump, former lobbyists and lawyers for polluting industries such as oil, gas and petrochemicals have entered leadership positions at the EPA.“The fossil fuel industry owns and controls the Trump administration on all matters that relate to their industry, and they have subservient Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate,” said Whitehouse. “The change in power has allowed a change in tactics and attitude.”Two environmental non-profits have sued the Trump administration for “secretly” convening a group of climate contrarians to bolster its effort to topple the endangerment finding.The EPA’s proposed undoing of the crucial legal conclusion comes as part of a larger war on the environment by the Trump administration, which has killed dozens of climate rules since re-entering the White House in January.“The motive is to help fossil fuels survive,” said Whitehouse.

Climate
Business
CO2

How Climate Change Is Increasing Landslide Risk Worldwide

As warming temperatures bring more extreme rain to the mountains, debris flows are on the rise

The landslide behind my neighbor’s backyard doesn’t exist—not according to the New York State landslide map or Greene County’s hazard-mitigation plan or the federal inventory managed by the U.S. Geological Survey. But when you’re standing in the middle of the debris field, the violence of the event is still evident 14 years after it occurred. The fan of the landslide, where a surge of boulders and mud blasted the forest open after rushing down the steeper slopes of Arizona Mountain in the Catskills, is about 100 feet wide—an undulating plane of rocks, mangled tree trunks, and invasive plants such as Japanese stiltgrass that thrive in disturbed areas.On a hot July day the seasonal stream that runs through this ravine, named the Shingle Kill, is small enough to step over. When Tropical Storm Irene hovered over these mountains on August 28, 2011, the Shingle Kill swelled like all the otherwise unremarkable streams in the area, frothing downhill in a torrent the color of chocolate milk. This storm was a particularly bad one, dropping up to 18 inches of rain on the northeastern escarpment of the Catskills. Throughout the region explosive rivers eroded their banks, flooding towns and ripping away buildings.The first house the Shingle Kill passes as it emerges into our community belonged at the time to Diane and Ken Herchenroder, who had lived there for nearly three decades. In the past, when the Shingle Kill occasionally raged, they could hear rocks colliding in the streambed. But this time it was louder—and faster.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.From the screened-in front porch of their 1880s colonial, they saw the stream crest its banks. First it took out a 32-foot-long footbridge that connected one side of the property to the other. Then trees started coming downriver, crashing into a culvert at the bottom of the yard. The culvert clogged, washing out the road. Water got diverted across their lawn on one side of the stream, and in the other direction it blew out the garage side door, then the front doors. (Their lawn tractor was found downstream days later.) Diane watched her row of beloved lilac bushes, probably more than 100 years old and 15 feet tall, get ripped from their roots. “They just floated away. And we thought, that’s going to be it,” she recalls. “Then we heard a rumble like a train barreling down the mountain.”Less than 2,000 feet above, in a hollow high on Arizona Mountain, oversaturated soils released themselves into the headwaters of the Shingle Kill, picking up speed and whatever materials the flow encountered as it carved downhill.As the slope flattened out, the landslide blew open the channel and spread out, depositing a wall of uprooted trees just upstream of the house. A slurry of rocks and mud continued flowing, plugging the Shingle Kill streambed all the way to the road, where it was stopped by the debris dam at the culvert.Robert Titus, a retired geology professor, and his wife, Johanna Titus, explored the slide about a month later for their Kaatskill Geologist column in a local newspaper. “We don’t use the words ‘awe,’ ‘awesome’ or ‘awed’ very often; we save them for when they are truly appropriate,” they wrote. “This was one of those times.” They described scenes that were evidence of boulders “floating on the moving muds,” as well as hundreds of “twisted and broken trees” that had been thrown high above the stream bank and were now stranded on top of the ravine. The Tituses recently told me it was unlike anything they had seen before or since.In July 2025, days of heavy rain triggered multiple mudslides and rockslides in New York State's Adirondacks, including this one on Mount Colden. It blocked access to hiking trails in a popular recreation spot in the High Peaks Wilderness area.To this day, the scar where the landslide began is unmissable from miles away.That this landslide didn’t get recorded is somewhat a quirk of disaster recovery. Debris from the slide itself wasn’t the singular cause of damage to any buildings or roads, so there was no financial fingerprint. The slide didn’t injure or kill anyone. Landslides aren’t mapped in the same way that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for instance, tracks flood zones and inundation risk, and a rate of occurrence can’t be modeled like a flood. Because landslide insurance practically doesn’t exist in most of the country, no one needs the data to assess actuarial risk for homeowners. According to the New York Geological Survey, the vast majority of landslides in the state go unreported.But the Shingle Kill landslide did change the mountainside that day. Joel DuBois, director of the Greene County Department of Soil and Water, visited the site in the days after Irene and reviewed some recent photos of the stream corridor that was affected by the debris flow. “There appear to be a number of cycles of incision and aggradation,” DuBois wrote. “That is to say that channel incision, or down-cutting, results in steeper bank angles and higher bank heights, leaving the adjacent hillsides susceptible to landslide” both during and after flood events. The sediment then flows downstream and accumulates at existing debris dams, which tends to cause channels to migrate laterally, he explained. That too can trigger landslide activity.The area remains vulnerable at a time when landslide risk is expected to increase across much of the northeastern U.S.—as well as a lot of the world. That’s because climate change is causing concentrated bursts of rain that fall over a short period to occur more frequently. Such intense rainfall events are known to be the biggest trigger of landslides.It’s not quite right to say landslides aren’t common in the Catskills, because this superold plateau has been eroding for perhaps a few hundred million years. On a nongeological timescale, though, landslide susceptibility isn’t something many people think about in New York State, and the state geological survey can estimate only that between 100 and 400 occur every year.As warmer temperatures lead to more moisture in the air, climate change is quickly warping that math. In the Northeast, the heaviest rainstorms are now 60 percent heavier than they were in the 1950s, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment. In a 2023 study, researchers at Dartmouth College found that extreme precipitation in the region will increase by 52 percent by the end of this century, mostly because of a higher number of such events each year. “Our landscape has pretty much been in equilibrium, for the most part, since the glaciers left,” Andrew Kozlowski, a New York State geologist, explained during a 2022 USGS presentation. “With climate change, we may be shifting that equilibrium and throwing all of this completely off balance, and there’s going to be a natural readjustment.”“Landslide” is the broad term for the movement of soils, rocks, and other debris down a slope. There are several different classifications for landslides. Some, like the Shingle Kill debris flow, move far too fast to be outrun. More than any other factor, they are set off by an intense storm. Others, such as rotational slides—backward-curving masses of material that can be hundreds of feet deep—are more sensitive to rainfall over the course of a season. They can move very slowly when a destabilized slope takes months to fail.Landslides can happen pretty much anywhere certain conditions exist but are most common in very steep mountain terrain where plenty of rain falls. In 2024 the U.S. Landslide Susceptibility Index was released and stated that 44 percent of the land in the U.S. could potentially experience landslide activity. Susceptibility is based partly on where landslides have occurred previously, and it wasn’t until the past decade that high-resolution lidar made it possible for states to survey vast swaths of land for evidence and clues. The extent to which states have done so is uneven.Benjamin DeJong, director of the Vermont Geological Survey, says you can think of landslide susceptibility as an inexact recipe. You’re going to need steeper slopes to achieve some kind of baseload that puts weight on the slope. Next, add loose, unconsolidated materials that can become saturated with water. If those saturated materials are overlying or underlying another kind of material that has very different permeability, meaning its ability to take in water, that contrast is a big factor.“By far the year that had the greatest total landslides that I’ve recorded was 2024. Last year was completely off the scale.” —David Petley University of HullThen you look at what’s on the base and on the top of the slope. If the base, or toe, is undercut—by a road, for instance, or a meandering stream—that’s going to make the slope more susceptible. Overloading the top, or head, of a slope with weight also drives it toward failure.The fourth ingredient is the loss of vegetation that helps to hold soils together. In California, for example, this loss happens on a regular cycle with wildfires. Vermont, DeJong says, went through an experiment in the 1800s where “the state tried to turn itself into Scotland by cutting down all the trees and bringing in sheep.” It was a bad idea that caused erosion and mass slope failure everywhere. The state gave up on that plan and allowed the forests to regrow. The last variable is how the slope handles stormwater. With more extreme precipitation events, it doesn’t take much mismanagement of a slope for the heavy weight of rain to concentrate in ways that cause the slope to fail.Geologist David Petley, who writes the Landslide Blog for the American Geophysical Union, has been maintaining a database of deadly landslides worldwide since 2004. He’s seen a clear long-term trend. “But by far—by far—the year that had the greatest total landslides that I’ve recorded was 2024,” he says. “Last year was completely off the scale.” Why? “The most simple hypothesis is that it was the year with the highest-ever global temperature. I do genuinely think it’s that simple.” There’s solid evidence that high atmospheric temperature, and possibly high sea-surface temperatures as well, drove high-precipitation events globally. “Last year I saw an extraordinary frequency of big storms that were triggering hundreds of thousands of landslides,” Petley says. They occurred at different locations all over the world.In the U.S., the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which came ashore in Florida in September 2024, dumped between 20 and 30 inches of water over the mountains of North Carolina. The storm ended up triggering more than 2,000 landslides across the Southeast. According to the USGS, in some cases several smaller mudslides converged into a single channel, burying entire communities in debris. The total number of people killed by landslides specifically, versus by flooding or a combination of the two, is hard to parse. But one storm-triggered mudslide in Craigtown, N.C., swept through a house, killing 11 members of the Craig family for whom the town is named. During the storm, four successive landslides in that valley wiped out the town.In the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, very old landslides might have been “brought back into activity” during Helene, Petley explains, reactivated by staggeringly intense rain. Scientists at World Weather Attribution pinned that extra intensity on climate change, reporting that it had made the storm’s rainfall throughout the Southeast about 10 percent heavier and the “unprecedented” rainfall totals over three days about 70 percent more likely than they would have been otherwise.In California, where dramatic debris flows have long been a concern, climate change is making matters worse in two ways. Bigger, more destructive wildfires wipe out more of the vegetation that was stabilizing the landscape. And then atmospheric rivers—a newer phenomenon consisting of long, narrow conveyer belts of moisture—arrive, bringing a series of intense rainfall events. Between December 2022 and January 2023 nine back-to-back atmospheric rivers struck California, leading to more than 600 landslides.Climate change is increasing landslide risk globally in other ways. In high mountain regions such as the European Alps and the Himalayas, melting permafrost and retreating glaciers are destabilizing steep slopes. A catastrophic glacier collapse in Switzerland this past summer destroyed an entire village; thankfully officials evacuated people just before it happened, but one person was killed.A section of the Shingle Kill streambed 14 years after a debris flow occurred on Arizona Mountain in New York State's Catskills during intense rain. The southern slope, shown on the left, continues to erode.Petley says the thing that’s surprised him most recently is the speed of change, especially during this past El Niño cycle. Strong rainfall events have always happened occasionally, but suddenly they are happening a lot. “I don’t think I fully understand why we’re seeing such a rapid shift to these events where a heavy rainfall will trigger 2,000 or 3,000 landslides in a relatively small area,” Petley says. In New Zealand in 2023, Cyclone Gabrielle triggered at least 100,000 landslides. Even in regions such as the Himalayas, where the monsoon season is becoming drier overall, the number of landslides is going up because the rainstorms that do arrive are more intense. “I worry a bit,” Petley says, “that the shift is happening so fast and becoming so extreme that in some places the risk is essentially unmanageable.”Vermont, like New York State, got clobbered by Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. DeJong, the Vermont state geologist, describes Irene as a wake-up call. “The mountains,” he says with a degree of irony, “are now where hurricanes come to die.”But it wasn’t until two freak July rainstorms—spaced exactly a year apart, one in 2023 and one in 2024—that the state’s geological survey became alarmed that landslides were going to be a much bigger problem than in the past. Given his experiences with Irene, DeJong expected the July 2023 storm to lead to maybe a handful of slides. Within a month of the storm his team had received more than 70 requests for landslide evaluations. Working on the ground in the aftermath of these two storms made DeJong realize that rainfall events at that scale “are fundamentally altering the landscape in ways that are not immediately recognizable,” he says.Now the four-person Vermont Geological Survey team is working on putting together a landslide-susceptibility map. The goal is to start with a more technical tool for scientists that can be overlaid with forecasts from the National Weather Service, which would create debris-flow forecasts like the ones already produced by the Los Angeles Department of Public Works. If that’s successful, the next step, DeJong says, would be creating a map that’s more accessible to the public, something that a person who’s looking to buy a parcel of land could reference to do some due diligence on landslide risk.But that gets tricky. The city of Juneau, Alaska, carried out a mapping project to evaluate levels of risk, with the aim of incorporating that risk into its land-use planning in 2024. The maps also would have highlighted concerns with existing buildings, though, meaning homeowners identified as living in high-risk areas might see their property values decline. Juneau’s susceptibility map was vehemently rejected by the community last year and was not adopted. In Vermont, as in many places, evidence of slope instability—and even past failures—hardly factors into development or the issuing of building permits.Rising landslide risk in mountainous places also creates a difficult tension about how to adapt to the effects of climate change. Recent disasters have made clear that mountain valleys in certain regions may not be great places to live. In Vermont “we’re losing a lot of housing in our flood corridors—which is a good thing,” DeJong says. “We’re getting people out of harm’s way.” But the state, like many others around the country, has a housing crunch with the need to build more. “When we’ve lost options down in the valleys, that puts a lot of building pressure up onto our slopes,” he explains. “And it’s really hard to make the argument not to do that.” Successfully adapting to one climate effect means running headlong into another.There are many climate-related problems to worry about in my Catskills community: the surging numbers of disease-carrying ticks, the choking out of native plants by invasive species, the hurricane-remnant floods, the decrease in winter snowfall that would replenish the aquifers, the summertime whiplash between deluge and drought. The Shingle Kill landslide wasn’t on my radar as a potential climate problem until a massive, ultraluxury resort and “branded residences” development was proposed for the hillside next to it. The plan calls for building more than 85 new structures totaling 275,593 square feet on a 102-acre site, 45 percent of which is classified as having steep slopes. To do so, developers will have to cut down about 11 acres of trees. The site, like the rest of our hamlet, has no access to municipal water or sewage. In addition to lining ponds for water storage and building a wastewater-treatment plant, a road network will be cut into the mountainside.The public documents for the project do not appear to show that a geologist evaluated whether the weight of all that development, plus the deforestation and excavation during construction, might further destabilize the slopes of the Shingle Kill. Our town planning board approved the project in May 2025 without requiring an environmental impact statement that would have identified and attempted to mitigate the biggest hazards. (I am a member of a community group that is suing our town planning board, arguing it didn’t take a hard look at potentially significant adverse effects to the environment from this project, including on groundwater availability, erosion, flooding and landslide risk.)Recent intense rain events “are fundamentally altering the landscape in ways that are not immediately recognizable.” —Benjamin DeJong Vermont Geological SurveyDiane and Ken Herchenroder’s house wasn’t damaged by the 2011 landslide, but the event did plenty of harm. Much of their property was rearranged by the acute displacement of raging water. The solid plug of rocks and mud, some 10 feet tall, had to be excavated from the streambed. Even once things were fixed, they didn’t want to stay. “We used to listen to the rain and the stream with the windows open, and it was very comforting,” Diane says from their house in New Hampshire, where they moved two years after the storm. “Honestly, after that slide occurred, Ken and I, I would have to say, have a little bit of post-traumatic stress from that.” Diane says her photographs of the landslide are on a CD somewhere; she hasn’t looked at them since. “I don’t really ever even talk about that day,” she says. “It was pretty devastating.”In 2018 Joe Merlino bought the Herchenroders’ former property, where he now lives with his daughter and his mother. A few years ago they had members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers come assess ongoing erosion along the Shingle Kill. The streambed continues to widen, and a sharp curve just upstream of Merlino’s house means floodwaters could rush right at it. He recalls that in 2021, when Tropical Storm Henri came through the Catskills, boulders smashed against the bridge that provides access between his house and his mom’s trailer. “[The Army Corps] basically told us the erosion is not going to stop,” Merlino says.Merlino often walks along the edges of the fan with his dog, observing the changes to the old debris piles with each storm. The possibility of more landslide activity is never far from his mind, he says, especially with a major development approved for the hillside above his home.I asked him whether he gets scared every time there’s heavy rain. “I come home from work early,” he says, to keep an eye on things and intervene if necessary. A few years ago he moved his daughter’s bedroom to the front of the house, away from the steep pitch of his backyard. “My fear is about my living room, which is in the back and has a lot of glass,” he says. “I watch the water rip around that curve, and one day something is going to come through and take the side of my house right out.”Greene County, where the Merlino family and I both live, is one of the four counties identified by New York State as the most vulnerable to expected annual building loss from landslides in the future. The county has steep escarpments that slope into the Hudson River Valley, which is rich in clays and silts from Glacial Lake Albany, a prehistoric waterbody that drained some 10,500 years ago. “I think we’re going to see a lot more slope failures in some of these populated areas in the Hudson Valley,” Kozlowski, the New York State geologist, said in 2022.Greene County considered landslides a threat back in 2016. In 2023 the county revisited its hazard-mitigation plan; our town, Cairo, was the only municipality out of 19 that did not participate. In the updated plan, the county removed landslides as a hazard, reasoning that they are “unlikely to lead to a disaster.”It’s true that landslides don’t do the same economic harm to our county as flooding and ice storms. But when they do occur, rebuilding is rarely an option. When a family lost their house in the town of Catskill to a landslide after a heavy rain event in May 2024, there wasn’t much anyone could do but condemn the structure.With funding for emergency response and climate resilience endangered at the federal level, is it worth investing in susceptibility maps for landslides that may never occur? Should people hesitate to build on potentially unstable slopes when that’s perhaps less risky than living directly in a flood path?DeJong says these are valid questions, but after his experiences over the past few years, he sees things differently. “We in Vermont have, so far, been incredibly fortunate to not see any fatalities,” he says. He remembers an older couple who were sitting in their house in July 2023 when the slope behind it failed. The structure warped outward, bending absurdly into something “that looked like a fun house falling over on them,” he recalls. Emergency services extracted them relatively unharmed, but DeJong knows it could have been worse. It turned out a lot worse in western North Carolina during Helene, where for years many building codes dismissed the risk of construction on steep slopes.It might take only one bad slide to change people’s minds about the risk. Before 2014, DeJong says, Washington State, much like New England, did not pay much attention to landslides and had no landslide program in its state geological survey. But then a slope in Oso, about an hour outside Seattle, experienced a catastrophic failure, taking out a neighborhood and killing 43 people. The state now takes landslides very seriously.“The Oso slide of New England could be right around the corner,” DeJong says. “People will say, ‘Why didn’t we know about this hazard? X number of people just died.’” He hopes his team can get its landslide-susceptibility maps finished so that when big rainfall events are forecast for the Green Mountains, officials can warn people in especially risky areas. “We’re really trying to switch to being more proactive so that X never becomes a number.”

Climate
Mountains
Land Use

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