One of the tragedies of Hurricane Helene is how few people had flood insurance.

I pulled data from FEMA for every county in North Carolina.

In most inland communities, less than 1% of homes were insured before the storm.

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Take Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, for example.

The county has 137,123 housing units.

But just 941 of those units—less than 0.7%—have flood insurance through the NFIP, the federal insurance program that issues 97% of the country’s flood insurance plans.

The world's largest climate and weather data archive is located in Asheville, NC.

Due to an historic climate disaster, its currently offline. I was going to NCEI's website for a story I'm working on about Hurricane Helene and America's increasingly fragile insurance system.

Public resources like this are essential to journalism and our understanding of the world.

distilled.earth

I think about this cartoon a lot. Now is probably a good time to plug my work.

I write a newsletter about climate change. You can subscribe to it here:

distilled.earth

The Economist just published this incredible and tragic chart.

Given how many people are killed each year by big cars, it's worth understanding how we got here.

Story time 🧵 In the last few decades, the SUV market in the U.S. has exploded.

According to automakers, changing consumer preferences explain this growth.

But these preferences didn't just change naturally. Automakers, and their successsful lobbying efforts, played a critical role.

This example from @TheEconomist's latest article on crypto mining in Texas is crazy. @TheEconomist I get the argument that bitcoin miners make for why they should be able to participate in demand response programs.

They are a big electricity load and can help cut peak demand.

But these programs were designed to incentivize energy savings. Attracting bitcoin miners with..

Climate change is often framed as a complex problem that requires a PHD to understand.

The solutions are also framed as complex.

But it's actually pretty simple. The issue is that the politics of it—mostly incumbent power—are hard.

That difference is subtle but important. Here's the problem of climate change in a nutshell:

Humans are burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, and factory farming.

Those activities are pumping gasses into the atmosphere.

If we don't stop, the stable climate modern life depends on will become unstable.

New data on clean energy's growth just came in and it delivered the good news I needed this week.

Through May, the U.S. added more than twice as much solar power capacity as it did through the same period last year.

There were a few other positive trends in the data:

🧵 Battery storage capacity is growing even faster than solar.

The U.S. has added 384% more storage capacity this year compared to the first 5 months of 2023.

Solar and batteries are expected to make up 80% of new power capacity this year in the U.S.

Both technologies are going to shatter the records they each set in 2023.

🧵 Last year, the U.S. added a record 19.3 GW of utility-scale solar capacity.

That was a big year and represented 72% more than 2022. But it's nothing compared to what's in store this year.

By year's end, the U.S. is expected to add 37.5 GW of capacity (94% y/y growth).

In the last decade, the price of lithium-ion batteries has plummeted.

As a result, we're now building much bigger batteries capable of storing more clean energy.



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As I wrote in a story last year, LIB batteries have quickly gone from providing niche grid services like frequency regulation to storing large amounts of power and supplying energy at times of peak demand.

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Last month, the U.S. built 3,980 MW of carbon-free electricity generating capacity.

So how much fossil fuel capacity did the country build that same month?

1 MW.

🧵 In April 2024, Texas built the most clean energy capacity of any state, adding 435 MW of solar, 528 MW of wind, and 243 MW of battery storage capacity.

Georgia brought the second most online because, well, Vogtle.

To decarbonize homes, we need to install millions of heat pumps.

In 2023, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces for the second year in a row.

I spent the last month trying to understand why. Here's what I learned:

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Reason #1 -- State and local policies

Over the last decade, more than 130 cities and 10 states have passed laws encouraging homeowners and builders to electrify their homes.

Many of those laws are working.

Paris just voted to triple parking fees for SUVs.

This is one of the many policies that has helped Paris go from one of the most polluted, traffic-clogged cities in the world to a sustainability leader.

Here's the story of how Paris took back its streets from cars. One of the first efforts to reduce car dependency in Paris was the launch of a bike-share service called Velib.

These bike-share services are in cities around the world today.

But when Paris launched the program in 2007 it was revolutionary.

In the 1960s a group of nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos went rogue.

Instead of building bombs, they began exploring a new form of clean energy.

50 years later, that technology is finally coming to market. It could solve one of renewable energy's biggest problems.

🧵 The initial idea came when one of the scientists, Bob Potter, was reading At The Earth's Core, a 1914 fantasy novel.

He began to wonder, what if it was possible to harass the vast amount of heat under the Earth’s surface to create electricity?

Mr. Bean just wrote an op-ed claiming that gas-powered cars are better for the environment than EVs.

But apparently he's never heard of a lifecycle analysis.

All EVs—even big electric trucks/SUVs—are better for the environment than their gas-powered counterparts. Make no mistake, there are environmental problems with EVs.

That's why we should build dense walkable cities with better public transit.

We should make and encourage people to buy smaller EVs.

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American cars are uniquely big, expensive, and inefficient.

Here's the best-selling car in America last year (right) vs. the best-seller in Europe (left).

So why are American cars so big?

🧵 The screenshot above comes from a video I just published on the weird loophole that made American cars so big.

If you want the 10 min version of the story, check out that video.

For those that want the 2 min version, below is a quick summary..

2020 corporate execs: "Let's make a big climate pledge. We can just buy junk offsets. It'll be cheapest, easiest marketing we've ever done."

2023: Here's a video I made about Delta's junk offsets a few months ago:

The way that humans generate electricity is changing rapidly.

Here are 7 charts that show one of the most important trends in power generation:

The growth of solar energy.

🧵 Between 2000 and 2010, solar production grew by a factor of 20.

The following decade, growth accelerated even more; between 2010 and 2020, production grew by a factor of 35.

Over the last ten years solar has grown by an average of 30% per year.

In the 1990s, Paris was one of the most polluted, traffic-clogged cities in the world.

Today, the city is a world leader in sustainable urban development.

Here's the story of how Paris took back its streets from cars. One of the first efforts to reduce car dependency in Paris was the launch of a bike-share service called Velib.

These bike-share services are in cities around the world today.

But when Paris launched the program in 2007 it was revolutionary.

In the last few decades, the SUV market in America has exploded.

Automakers say the reason for this growth has been "changing consumer preferences."

But that's not the full story.

One of the main reasons for the growth is the "SUV loophole."

🧵 In 1975, Congress passed a law that forced automakers to double the average fuel efficiency of their vehicles to 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985.

But half a century later, the average vehicle produced in America still doesn’t get 27.5 MPG.

So what happened?

Clean energy critics often argue that addressing climate change will require too much mining.

So I looked into the data.

I found that our current fossil fuel economy requires 535x more mining than a 100% clean energy economy would.

🧵 In 2020, 7m tons of minerals were mined globally for low-carbon energy, according to @IEA.

(These are often referred to as “transition minerals.”)

In order to limit warming to 2°C, we’ll need to scale up that production to about 28m tons per year.

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Scientists from around the world worked on the latest IPCC report for almost a decade.

But according to leaked documents, many of their recommendations were removed or altered significantly.

🧵 Whenever the IPCC releases a major report, media outlets generally refer to “the report” in the singular.

But there are actually multiple reports.

There's a report that scientists produce that is often thousands of pages.

And there's the summary report for policymakers.