Last week, one of my best friends since childhood, Matt, came to visit. He moved to Colorado with his wife three years ago. While he loves it out West, and has gotten pretty good at fishing trout from Rocky Mountain rivers, he spent much of the previous decade working as a land steward for a conservation group out east on Long Island, protecting salt marshes and the threatened species that live in them. The rest of us either lived in the city or closer to it back then, so he was by himself a lot of the time, and got really good at fishing. Some of his catches, and the meal he would prepare afterward, are the stuff of legend in our tight-knit little group of four food-obsessed guys. So when we got together on Saturday, we filled our two other friends’ cars with gear and drove out to the South Fork to try our luck.
I won’t bury the lede: We didn’t catch anything, despite casting into the Great Peconic Bay, the ocean surf and the Shinnecock Canal. But as we donned our waders and trudged out into the reeds in a quiet, marshy spot at the first location, Matt caught a whiff of smoke in the air. I wondered if it might be campfires or a roaring hearth at some nearby beach house; it was gray and cold enough that I zipped up the black jacket I had worn all over Finland last March. Matt, who has always had a keener nose than the rest of us, shook his head.
“That’s wildfire smoke, dude,” he said. He would know. Shortly after moving to the Boulder area, he nearly lost everything in the December 2021 Marshall fire, which stopped roughly a mile short of engulfing his apartment.
By Tuesday, New York City was shrouded in smoke. I watched the haze envelope the Verrazzano Bridge from my window here in Bay Ridge. We hadn’t yet put the air conditioner in. As it was, we had another appliance that had jacked up our electricity bill by over $100 last month, and I have been relishing the briny breeze we get living so close to the Narrows tidal strait that divides Brooklyn from Staten Island. But by around noon my throat and nose were itchy and the cat kept sneezing. I shut all the windows and cranked our air purifier to its top setting. I haven’t turned it down since.
New York has some of the highest electricity rates in the country. The metro area also has one of the state’s least reliable grids going in the summertime, a symptom of increased demand met with a supply that has shifted from the steady nuclear power from Indian Point to less dependable natural gas, which now provides most of our electricity. We had blackouts last summer. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the main watchdog that monitors the health of our continent’s aging, heaving grids, has warned of even more outages this summer. Natural gas price swings are the new normal since Russia invaded Ukraine. But the fuel is particularly expensive in New York, where – like an addict that keeps needing higher doses while refusing to secure a steady supply of a drug he insists he will imminently quit using – we need more and more but block pipelines that could more cheaply supply the demand.
Luckily, our efficient little purifier has had no discernible impact on our bills since I bought it at Wirecutter’s suggestion in 2019. But the filters and the appliance itself came out to something like $300 at the time. As I dragged the purifier and a box fan from our bedroom to the living room to the office, I wondered whether we would need a second A/C unit to keep this apartment cool come July. My wife and I are in our early 30s, generally healthy, and don’t yet have kids. We also make enough money between us that paying a surprisingly high service bill doesn’t break the bank. We are lucky.
Throughout the early months of the pandemic, I reported on the millions of Americans whose unregulated electric utilities defied state orders to stop shutting off power for nonpayment as state governments from coast to coast scrambled to stop the novel coronavirus’ spread. Relief was short-lived for the people whose utilities couldn’t cut them off from one of the basic necessities of modern life. Despite some government programs to cancel out the debt, millions of people are still facing billions of dollars in unpaid utility bills.
During the pandemic, public officials urged the most vulnerable – older people, people with breathing problems – to stay indoors. But fresh air was encouraged, especially in pre-war apartment buildings like pretty much every place I have ever lived in, which were designed after the 1918 Spanish flu with heating systems that get so hot you can keep the windows open even in the dead of winter. Not in this disaster. Now you needed to not just stay inside, but also keep the outside air from coming in. Clean air would come at a cost, whether that be for appliances or the electricity to run them.
Everything was visibly worse on Wednesday, but I had scheduled in-person meetings in the city with sources visiting from out of town. When I left my apartment that morning to commute into my office in Midtown, an eerie orange pallor had cast a sepia tone over the whole neighborhood. Fewer people were out than usual. By 10 a.m., it was mostly dogwalkers, retirees and delivery workers. People tend to be a little more friendly and chatty here than in the other parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan where I’ve lived over the years. But yesterday was different. No one would let you pass by without locking eyes and exchanging a knowing glance and eyebrow flicker that seemed to say, “yo, what the fuck is going on?” At least two people mentioned that it seemed worse than after 9/11, which meteorologists later confirmed to be true.
Versions of this conversation played out throughout the afternoon as I watched the skyscrapers fade into haze from the 10th-floor windows of my office on 43rd Street and talked to people across the region about what this smoke meant for their health and their finances.
“Low-income households are once again facing very high electricity bills,” John Howat, a senior energy analyst at the National Consumer Law Center, a watchdog group in Boston, told me yesterday afternoon. “For those without options other than to close the windows and perhaps switch on an air conditioner, that could create expenses that are going to be very difficult to manage. Not only during this event, but throughout the summer.”
None of this is to say we should slow the effort to get off fossil fuels, he noted.
“We need to decarbonize,” he said. “But the reality is the cost of that transition without very intentional programs and policies will disproportionately harm those who are already struggling to retain access to essential services.”
You can read the full story here on HuffPost.
Some recent stories to catch up on since my last email:
States are passing laws designed to thwart climate protests – in the name of stopping neo-Nazis from sabotaging the electrical grid. My HuffPost story from April 19 looked at this latest wave of legislation and what it means as police crack down on Atlanta’s “Cop City” protests and the gunmen who shot out substations in North Carolina last winter remain at large.
Chile is nationalizing its reserves of “white gold.” On April 30, I wrote for HuffPost about President Gabriel Boric’s move to transfer majority ownership of the world’s largest actively-mined lithium reserve from two private corporations to a state-owned firm. As an exchange between mining giant Albemarle’s chief executive and a CNBC anchor illustrated, the word “nationalization,” which brings to mind Maoist troops seizing private banks, might not be the best one to capture what resource-rich Latin American countries are attempting to do.
Does carbon capture technology have any role to play? On May 5, I asked a guest question on an episode of “Open to Debate,” the rebranded “Intelligence Squared U.S.” show, where Bureau of Economic Geology research scientist Katherine Romanak went head to head with Stanford University’s Mark Z. Jacobson.
Oliver Stone wants to atone for Hollywood anti-nuclear sins. On May 7, I reviewed the Oscar-winning director’s new documentary “Nuclear Now!” and published a Q&A with Stone and his collaborator, American University professor Joshua Goldstein. I pressed them on real concerns that nuclear skeptics have, and Stone made some eyebrow-raising remarks about Jane Fonda and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The U.S. finally proposed some climate regulations on power plants. On May 11, I wrote for HuffPost about the Environmental Protection Agency’s long-awaited greenhouse gas rules for the nation’s largest source of planet-heating pollution after cars.
Remember Biden’s green-home debacle? He made a move to resolve it. On May 12, I wrote for HuffPost about the legally-overdue White House policy to raise the standards for federally-backed mortgages, requiring that the one-sixth of new homes built each month that aren’t already subject to the nation’s most efficient building codes follow the more stringent rules.
The U.S. is running low on the equipment needed to avoid blackouts and add more renewables to the grid. On May 19, HuffPost published my lengthy investigation into the electrical transformer shortage, which has worsened over the past three years as demand soars and suppliers struggle to ramp up production.
The Supreme Court gutted federal wetland protections. On May 29, I wrote with my HuffPost colleague Chris D’Angelo about the ruling that swept away Obama-era protections for millions of acres of bogs, marshes and lagoons whose water channels into waterways already protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972. The move stripped federal oversight from even more wetlands than the Trump administration tried to deregulate.
The debt ceiling deal gave a controversial gas pipeline legal carte blanche – but failed to deliver totally uncontroversial permitting reforms. On May 31, I wrote for HuffPost about how the Mountain Valley Pipeline won a total victory while the policy changes Democrats and Republicans agree would help build more transmission lines fell to the wayside.
Some recommended reading:
I generally really like Tom Scocca’s writing and read Indignity's weather reviews pretty religiously but this particular newsletter from Wednesday is especially good and worth reading for the thoughtful reflections on pipeline politics and comparing smoke-choked NYC to a mostly bygone era in Beijing.
I also love the newsletter Scope of Work, which writes clearly and in depth about supply chains and infrastructure. This dispatch from Hydro-Québec’s Manic-5 dam deep in northern Canada is a delightful read and takes you on an enviable little adventure.
The New York Times Magazine took a rigorous look at Vienna’s social housing miracle and laid out how it differs from how other countries, especially the U.S., deals with the shortage of affordable places to live.
The Polycrisis, the excellent newsletter written by my friend Tim Sahay and the analyst Kate Mackenzie, took a sharp look at the U.S. plans to source critical metals for the energy transition from allies.
I’m about two stories from finishing Hit Parade of Tears, the new collection of stories by the late writer and actress Izumi Suzuki. It’s dually haunting and hilarious, and probably my favorite short fiction book in a while.
On a flight to Jamaica in April, I cruised through Tender Is the Flesh, Sarah Moses’ nauseatingly grisly translation of Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica’s dystopian novel about a world where meat becomes toxic to humans, and people start breeding other people for food. It might be the fastest I ever read a novel, which says as much about the prose as it does about how quickly you will want to get through its horrors.
A less hazy New York, seen from the Bay Ridge ferry dock.
Some recommended viewing:
Should we/can we abolish nuclear weapons? Reason magazine hosted a debate between author Ward Wilson, who says we can eliminate the atom bomb, and defense consultant Peter Huessy who says that’s a fantasy.
Kazakhstan is caught between Russia and China. German broadcaster DW aired a short documentary on how the Central Asian nation is leveraging its vast oil and gas resources to pull off a delicate geopolitical balancing act.
John Mearsheimer on where the war in Ukraine is headed. The godfather of the international relations realism gave a 90-minute lecture on the war he (in)famously blamed NATO for instigating.
Could Turkic states form a new political bloc? It isn’t likely immediately, says Professor James Ker-Lindsay, whose videos on geopolitics and sovereignty movements offer some of the highest-quality international relations analysis on YouTube. But there are some interesting early signs of what it could look like.
How did FDR become the most consequential president since Lincoln? The History channel – which apparently still finds time to do history documentaries when it’s not fixing cameras on whackjobs who think aliens are more likely than non-Europeans to have pulled off ancient engineering marvels than – is airing the first of a three-part docuseries on the only really good president from New York.
“Bad Sisters” on Apple TV. We just finished it last night. Really good!
Some recommended listening:
On The Intercept podcast “Deconstructed,” Ryan Grim interviewed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.
On Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast, analysts Dan Wang and Adam Ozimek dug into what a successful implementation of the major semiconductor law, the CHIPS Act, will look like.
On Decouple’s latest podcast, nuclear energy consultant Mark Nelson offers up another one of his energy master classes, this time on uranium.
On Shayle Kann’s recent “Catalyst” podcast, Cristóbal Undurraga, the CEO of copper mining technology company Ceibo, gives a thorough overview of the global market for the metal, why more is needed, and how permitting new mines went from taking four years to 17.
“Coast” by bad tuner
“Mantra” by Ojerime and Iman Europe
“Poinciana” by Ahmad Jamal
“Israel” by Bill Evans Trio
I sincerely thank you for your time and attention. I hope you feel it was earned. I’m once again experimenting with a new, cleaner format for this newsletter. Do you like this edition better than the last one? Reply to this email with any thoughts, comments, recommendations, tips, songs, or anything you might want to say. I would love to hear from you about how this newsletter can be more worth your time.
Gratefully yours from a slightly less hazy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn,
Alexander