A major storm took hold across swaths of the central and southern United States on Wednesday unleashing extreme flooding and huge tornadoes from Arkansas up to Michigan. And conditions are expected to worsen on Friday as soils become saturated and water piles up: The National Weather Service is warning of a “life-threatening, catastrophic, and potentially historic flash flood event,” along with a risk of very large hail and more twisters. Eight people are so far confirmed dead, while 33 million are under flood watches across 11 states.

While scientists will need to do proper research to suss out exactly how much climate change is contributing to these storms, what’s known as an attribution study, they can say generally how planetary warming might worsen an event like this. It’s not necessarily that climate change created this storm — it could have happened independent of all the extra carbon that humanity has pumped into the atmosphere — but there are some clear trends making rainfall worse.

“In a world without the burning of fossil fuels, this event would happen once in a lifetime — that’s kind of what the National Weather Service is saying,” said Marc Alessi, a climate science fellow at the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “But with the burning of fossil fuels, with more heat-trapping emissions, with a warming planet, this event will become more frequent.”

Rainfall is changing because Earth sweats. When the sun evaporates water off Earth’s surface, that moisture rises into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls as rain. But greenhouse gases trap heat up there, so the planet sweats more in response. In other words, it strikes an energy balance.

A warmer atmosphere also gets “thirstier”: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the air can hold 6 to 7 percent more water. That means more moisture is available to fall as rain: This weekend, the slow-moving storm is forecasted to dump as much as 15 inches of rainfall in some areas. “The sponge, which is the atmosphere in this case, will become bigger, which allows the sponge to hold more water and carry it from oceans farther inland,” Alessi said. “That could be tied into this event here.” 

The body of water in question here is the Gulf of Mexico. An outbreak of tornadoes and heavy rain is typical for this time of year as warming waters send moisture into the southern and central United States. And at the moment, the Gulf of Mexico is exceptionally warm. “There’s a lot more fuel for these rain-producing storms to lead to more flooding,” Alessi said. (The influence of climate change on tornadoes in the U.S., though, isn’t as clear.)

So a warmer Gulf of Mexico is not only producing more moisture, but the atmosphere is also able to soak up more of that moisture than it could before human-caused climate change. Indeed, the U.S. government’s own climate assessments warn that precipitation is already getting more extreme across the country, as are the economic damages from the resulting flooding. That’s projected to get worse with every bit of additional warming.

The problem is that American cities aren’t built to withstand this new atmospheric reality. Urban planners designed them for a different climate of yesteryear, with gutters and sewers that whisk away rainwater as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. With ever more extreme rainfall, that infrastructure can’t keep up, so water builds up and floods. And with storms that last for days, like those tearing through Arkansas and Kentucky right now, soils get saturated until they can hold no more water, exacerbating flooding even more. On Thursday, rescue crews in Nashville, Tennessee were scrambling to save people trapped by surging water levels. 

Now scientists will have to pick through the data to figure out, for instance, how much additional rain the storm dropped because of the sponge effect and warming of the Gulf of Mexico. But the overall trend is abundantly clear: As the planet warms, it doesn’t always get drier, but wetter, too.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Did climate change supercharge the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ storm pummeling the central US? on Apr 4, 2025.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

Seven Indigenous nations have withdrawn from discussions over an oil and gas liquids pipeline in Michigan, citing federal agencies’ failure to adequately engage with tribal governments during the process.

The move is expected to trigger lawsuits the tribes hope will block the controversial Line 5 project, a 645 mile pipeline that carries over half-a-million barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids per day and runs between the United States and Canada. Enbridge, the company behind Line 5, has proposed a tunnel under the Great Lakes in order to replace a section of the 72-year-old pipeline.

The tribal nations have been involved with the permitting process since 2020, when Enbridge applied to build the underground tunnel for the pipeline, but have grown increasingly dissatisfied with negotiations they say ignored tribal expertise, input, and concerns, and undermined treaty rights. 

On March 20, tribes say the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency assessing the project and its environmental impacts, informed them that it would likely soon grant Enbridge a fast-tracked permit for the tunnel under President Donald Trump’s energy emergency declaration, which effectively created a new class of permit to boost energy supplies. That announcement, the tribes say, prompted the withdrawal.

“Tribal Nations are no longer willing to expend their time and resources as Cooperating Agencies just so their participation may be used by the Corps to lend credibility to a flawed [Environmental Impact Statement] process and document,” they wrote in a March 21 letter to the Corps. 

Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said the tunnel would destroy “not only the Great Lakes, but also an Indigenous people’s way of life, my way of life, for all Great Lakes Anishinaabe.”

“We’ll do what we need to do now moving forward, not participating in that process,” she added.

Tribal nations in Michigan — and others across the country — have long argued that the pipeline is unsafe, and that the tunnel would further threaten their way of life by extending the possibility of an oil spill into the Straits of Mackinac, which connect lakes Michigan and Huron, and potentially contaminating the largest source of fresh water in North America.

In an email, Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy said the tunnel would “make a safe pipeline safer while also ensuring the continued safe, secure, and affordable delivery of essential energy to the Great Lakes region.” But critics say that risk has yet to be properly analyzed and the Army Corps maintains that considering the risk of oil spills, or their impacts, is beyond the scope of its authority and should be conducted by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Despite that stance, in early January an assistant secretary with the Department of Defense directed the Army Corps to carry out that assessment. That will now likely be ignored under the Trump administration’s executive order, according to attorneys with the tribes.

In an email, Army Corps spokesperson Carrie Fox said the agency is reviewing the tribes’ letter and relying on existing regulations to speed up permitting for eligible projects under Trump’s executive order, adding that new procedures will be posted publicly.

The odds are heavily weighted toward Enbridge, according to Matthew Fletcher, a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and a professor of law at the University of Michigan.

“The rule of law is basically dead. Enbridge and the feds are not acting in good faith,” he said in an email. “It must be apparent to the tribes that, in this administration, no matter what the tribes say or do, or evidence they provide, etc., Enbridge will get absolutely anything it wants from the United States.”

The tribes aren’t alone. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has repeatedly called for the suspension of pipeline operations until the free, prior, and informed consent, or FPIC, of affected Indigenous nations has been secured. FPIC, a right guaranteed under international law that says countries must consult with Indigenous peoples in good faith and obtain consent for development projects on their land, is rarely enforced and the U.S. has yet to codify the obligation.

“Any law that requires consent, or even consultation, of Indians and tribes, is a threat to this entire industry,” Fletcher said. “I guarantee this administration will ignore and/or denigrate all of these laws on behalf of their climate change-inducing and pollution-generating constituents.”

But even adhering to the Trump administration’s “America First” priorities, the tunnel project shouldn’t receive a fast-tracked permit, said David Gover, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund which is representing Bay Mills. “You’re talking about a project, Line 5, that serves Canadian companies and Canadian interest,” he said. 

While much of the pipeline’s oil and gas products pass through Michigan and on to Canadian refineries, Enbridge says the pipeline provides jobs and other benefits to the state, including more than half of Michigan’s propane. Those benefits won’t pay off in the long run, according to opponents, and experts have said the pipeline’s continued operation would generate tens of billions of dollars in climate damages. Moreover, replacing that section of pipeline wouldn’t create more capacity, Gover said, “So there’s no extension or expansion of meeting those energy needs here in America.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

“We are multifaceted governments, and not all tribes oppose oil. But all tribes in the state of Michigan have stood up to say that this is a bad project,” said President Gravelle. “If we wanted to protect one of our most precious resources, which is the Great Lakes themselves, we would decommission this for those future generations.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice, one of the law firms representing the Bay Mills Indian Community, is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why Indigenous nations are walking away from pipeline talks in Michigan on Mar 31, 2025.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina, WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region, and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Marie Richards sat in her living room in northern Michigan. She was having a hard time talking about her job at the U.S. Forest Service in the past tense.

“I absolutely loved my job,” she said. “I didn’t want to go.”

Richards, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, was a tribal relations specialist at the Huron-Manistee National Forests. In mid-February, she found out she was one of the some 3,400 workers who had been targeted for layoffs — an estimated 10 percent of the workforce — as part of the Trump administration’s move to cut costs and shrink the federal government.

Richards watched as some of her colleagues were laid off on February 14 — the so-called Valentine’s Day massacre, when the Trump administration laid off thousands of probationary employees, generally hired within the past two years. She got a call from her supervisor that Saturday informing her that she had been let go, too. The letter she received cited performance issues, even though she, along with others in a similar position, had received a pay raise less than two months earlier.

“None of us deserved this,” Richards said. “We all work hard and we’re dedicated to taking care of the land.”

The U.S. Forest Service, which stewards 193 million acres of public lands from Alaska to Florida, was in trouble even before Trump took office. Chronically understaffed, the service was already under a Biden-era hiring freeze, all the while on the front lines of fighting and recovering from back-to-back climate disasters across the country.

For now, workers with the Forest Service fear this isn’t just the end of the line for their dream careers, but also a turning point for public lands and what they mean in the United States.

“It’s catastrophic,” said Anders Reynolds with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit that litigates environmental issues in the southeastern U.S. “We are losing an entire generation of talent and passion.”

The federal agency does more than ensure that Americans have a place to hunt, hike, fish, or paddle. In the South, forest workers played a key role in helping western North Carolina and other communities recover from impacts of Hurricane Helene. In the West, they’re taking on fire risk mitigation and fighting wildfires. They’re also involved in fisheries management in places like Alaska. Across the country, agency biologists and foresters are busy working to strengthen the over 150 national forests and 20 grasslands it monitors in the face of changing climate.

Increasingly, the service is getting spread thin. 

The agency has experienced a steady decrease in staffing over the last decade and the workers that remain are often overworked and underpaid, according to Reynolds.

“That means you’re going to see those campgrounds close, the trails go unmaintained, roads closed, you’re going to feel the effects of wildfire and hurricane recovery work that’s just going to remain undone,” said Reynolds. “Communities are going to struggle.”

The Forest Service has reduced its capacity over many years, causing headaches for staff.

A report from the National Association of Forest Service Retirees showed the agency losing a little over half of staff who supported specialty ecological restoration projects — meaning a whole range of jobs, from botanists to foresters to wildlife and fisheries biologists — between 1992 and 2018. As a result, understaffed Forest Service ranger districts, hemorrhaging staff positions, have consolidated.

Former employees report they saw serious financial and staffing shortages during their time. Bryan Box, a former timber sale administrator with the Forest Service who took some time out of the agency to care for his aging mother, said he found the working conditions unsuitable for a stable, normal life. Box worked for the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin, where he said he made so little he biked around on his off days rather than wasting money on gas. While he was working, multiple national forests around him consolidated, causing a downward spiral on organizational capacity.

“We decommissioned buildings, we decommissioned the infrastructure that we had back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when we had this huge staff,” Box said. “And that put us into a position where we couldn’t hire seasonal employees anymore because we didn’t have housing for them. In rural northern Wisconsin, you know, just there’s not any housing available really. I think at one point our firefighters were all living above a bar.” 

Other foresters he knew failed to make rent and were evicted or lived itinerantly, couch-surfing, for the love of the work they did. For Box, the financial realities became untenable. So, too, had the restrictions on his work, which grew as budgets failed to grow.

Box’s program was expensive to run and required travel, often to reduce fire fuels by harvesting timber after an emergency. The program he worked for, Box said, ended up needing to reduce costs by cutting travel funds and ending overtime, making it difficult for him to do his job well. 

Much of their work involves emergency response, not only fighting fires but also picking up the pieces after conflagrations and hurricanes leave potentially thousands of acres of dead timber. 

Matthew Brossard works as the current business representative and organizer for the National Federation of Federal Employees, and was formerly the general vice president for the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Forest Service Council, which represents around 18,000 employees of the Forest Service, 6,000 of whom are probationary, meaning they have either recently been hired or moved to a new position within the agency. Typically, probation — a part of every federal hiring process — is one or two years. Probationary employees were primarily targeted in the layoffs, meaning a generation of hires is potentially interrupted. Brossard said even though the administration maintains they have not fired positions essential to public safety, there’s more to fighting fires than just the firefighters. Support and logistical personnel are essential. “Extra dispatchers, security to close off roads, food unit leaders, base camp managers, all these very important, 100 percent-needed positions. Those people are getting terminated right now,” Brossard said. 

In another instance recounted by Brossard, someone on assignment to help with long-term hurricane recovery in Louisiana was fired while he was there. The employee lived in Oregon and reported having no financial support for his trip home. 

The loss of a seasonal workforce will also be felt, Brossard added. “Without that influx of seasonal workforce, it puts a huge amount of work onto the permanent staff if they’re still employed to do all the work,” he said, meaning not only trailwork and campground maintenance, but also research and other essential work. “So the work that in the summer that should have been done by 15 or 20 people are now going to be done by five or six.”

As workers continue to struggle with the fallout of their abrupt firings, their union is jumping in to protect them, Brossard said. The NFFE-FSC has joined in multiple lawsuits to challenge the firings, including one filed February 12, provided to Grist, that aims to put a stop to the firings and reverse the ones that have already happened, on grounds that the terminations are unlawful. A decision on the lawsuit is still to come, with more potential legal action following, Brossard said. 

“You’re not reducing, you know, the stereotypical bureaucrats,” Brossard said. “You’re reducing the boots on the ground that are going out and doing work.” 

In an emailed statement to Grist, a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the new agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins, supported Trump’s directive to cut spending and inefficiencies while strengthening the department’s services. “As part of this effort, USDA has made the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service. To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters.” 

The statement continued, “Released employees were probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary IRA funding. It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term. Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.” 

Back in northern Michigan, Marie Richards, the former tribal relations specialist, crunched down the snowy driveway, pointing toward the Huron-Manistee National Forests where she worked. It spans nearly 1 million acres and covers land tribal nations ceded in two treaties, which the federal government has a responsibility to keep in trust. 

Richards said workers like her are also a vital part of pushing the federal government to meet its trust responsibility to tribal nations. She helped connect the region’s federally recognized tribes with officials and staff at the forest service, set up meetings, and ensured work was being carried out responsibly. 

“It’s not just the damage to that trust relationship with the Forest Service,” said Richards, who left her job as a repatriation and historic preservation specialist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians to work at the agency. “It’s across the board for so many things, and tribes trying to work through that freeze, and making people understand that this isn’t DEI — that this is governmental affairs.”

Richards doesn’t know what’s next; she wants to finish her dissertation (about the impact of the lumber industry on traditional cultural landscapes and Anishinaabe bands and communities) and continue her work. 

“It still really hurts that this dream of mine is kind of shattered, and we’ll see, and find a new dream,” she said. “But ultimately, my career, my livelihood, is in tribal relations for our heritage and I will find a home somewhere.”

Lilly Knoepp contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US Forest Service firings decimate already understaffed agency: ‘It’s catastrophic’ on Feb 27, 2025.

This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.

“You see that new building over there with the roof and red barn?” asks Bob Walton as he guides me through the dirt roads of Isabella County in mid-Michigan, where he serves as a trustee for Isabella Township. “I know of at least three new buildings that were put up for agriculture that are being basically paid for by windmill money.”

Walton took a break from compacting soil recently planted with soybeans to show me the tall structures, blades rotating slowly in the breeze, now visible from every angle on his land and neighboring properties. The silver towers look incongruous next to the red barns and outbuildings that would fit perfectly on a postcard from rural America. It feels almost as if you’ve landed on the set of a science fiction movie—or time-traveled into the future.

It took a while to catch up with Walton, a third-generation farmer, working some 400 acres, mostly on land that once belonged to his grandfather. Now in his 70s, he’s turning the business over to his daughter and son-in-law. That does not keep him out of his tractor, which is where I found him one afternoon in May.

“I feel bad for the people that think they’re so ugly,” he says, looking at the wind turbines near his home. “I just think they’re majestic. I love the red lights at night.”

It was not love at first sight. When a private firm called Apex Clean Energy came calling in 2018, Walton recalls, “Our first thought was, how can we stop this?”

Energy developers and utility companies began breaking ground on a significant number of big wind projects in Michigan in 2008, after a bipartisan agreement requiring 10% of the state’s electricity to be generated from carbon-free renewables. A new law passed last year by Democratic majorities in the state legislature boosted that requirement to 60% by 2035.

Most of Michigan’s early wind turbines were located north of Detroit, on the eastern side of the state that Michiganders call “The Thumb” (because it’s shaped like a thumb on a mitten). Walton and his neighbors got in touch with farmers and residents who had been living with—and collecting revenue from—wind farms for several years.

Eventually, they decided they liked what they heard. One piece of advice was to lock down compensation for any impact to productive farmland.

“If 10 years down the road we find out there’s tile damage, they still have to pay for it,” says Walton, referring the underground system of pipes, called drain tile, that protect crops from heavy rains or floods. “That’s the other thing we learned, you got to write everything in.”

‘We need energy!’

Walton, a Republican, does not often agree with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. He is skeptical about electric vehicles, is not vaccinated and did not agree with Whitmer’s enforced lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the strictest in the United States. Walton’s family property, in addition to hosting a windmill built by Apex, is also home to an oil derrick.

Oil deposits are dotted throughout Michigan farmland. Decades ago, it was common for land agents to canvass local farmers—as wind and solar developers are doing now—and offer lease payments in exchange for siting an oil or gas well on their property. Many of these wells have been capped, but the one on Bob Walton’s family farm is still active, with the revenue going to his sister.

Walton doesn’t see a new generation of energy projects as a threat to rural life. Instead, he sees a steady stream of wind turbine income—free from drought, flood or fluctuations in crop prices—that will help his daughter and son-in-law create a sustainable 21st century farm.

“I called my grandkids, and they all said, ‘Grandpa I think it’s a good thing,’ ” Walton says. “Because we need energy!”

Lawyering up

Walton was first elected trustee for Isabella Township in 2016. “The reason I got on,” he says, “is I didn’t want somebody moving out from the city telling us farmers what the hell we’re going to do now.”

Apex’s proposal to build wind turbines in Isabella and nearby townships surfaced during Walton’s first term. Opponents of the project, working under the banner of a group called Isabella Wind Watch, accused him of a conflict of interest. Walton signed a lease with Apex as a private landowner and also voted to approve the project as a public official.

Activists who wanted to block the turbines, says Walton, “fought us like crazy.” In 2018, he beat back three recall campaigns. “I lawyered up. We stopped them at the county” where recall petitions must be approved for clarity.

Walton stood for re-election in 2020 and won handily, along with other township officials who had backed the wind farm. “They put somebody up against all of us,” he says, “and we beat them two and three to one.” He was renominated for another term in an August 6 Republican primary and will be re-elected in the fall. Democrats are not contesting any Isabella Township positions, as often happens in rural Michigan.

“I’ve told my friend Albert, who’s a liberal, if it wasn’t for us conservatives in this county, they wouldn’t have got this,” says Walton.

That would be Albert Jongewaard, senior development manager for Apex, who is now based in Minnesota. From 2007 to 2010, Jongewaard raised money and managed campaigns for Democratic candidates in the Deep South. In Michigan, he spent several years working for Apex and burned a lot of shoe leather talking to farmers, landowners, residents and local officials in Isabella and Montcalm Counties.

Jongewaard likes to quote Rich Vander Veen, an early pioneer of wind energy in Michigan: “It takes ten-thousand cups of coffee to build a wind farm.”

Getting off the ground in Gratiot

Years of patient, caffeine-fueled persuasion has paid off for several development companies in Gratiot County, located in mid-Michigan just south of Isabella County. The first wind farm in Gratiot County began operating in 2012; there are now six of them, with over 400 turbines generating more than 900 megawatts of electricity. That’s roughly enough to meet the annual energy needs of 300,000 households.  

These big projects pay big taxes on windmills, which cost up to $2 million per turbine. Greater Gratiot Development, Inc., a nonprofit serving Gratiot County, created a spreadsheet showing $93 million in tax revenue collected from wind farms between 2012 and 2023. That’s more than $7 million a year, a significant boost for local governments in a county with just over 40,000 inhabitants.

Jongewaard and the team from Apex also hit paydirt in Isabella County—but not so far in Montcalm County, which sits just south of Isabella and west of Gratiot. In 2022 and 2023, there were 26 successful recall campaigns against local officials who backed solar and wind projects in Michigan. Eleven of them were in Montcalm County, enough to stall a proposed Apex wind project.

“It is true in Michigan there is organized opposition to these projects. That’s a fact,” says Jongewaard. “People are right to ask questions, you should be asking questions.”

The issues raised by Montcalm County Citizens United, a group opposing the project, included a decline in property values, sleep deprivation from turbine noise, “damage to wildlife, domestic and farm animals, bat and bird kills, [and] massive government handouts.”

Jongewaard insists there are solid answers to these and other objections. “These projects aren’t dangerous,” he says. “They don’t have adverse health impacts. We know that through science and lived reality.”

Such arguments carried the day in Isabella County, where Apex won approval to build 136 wind turbines spread across 56,000 acres and seven townships. In 2021, Apex sold the project to DTE for an undisclosed sum. The press release announcing the sale projects $30 million in tax payments to local units of governments over the next 30 years, along with a whopping $100 million in lease payments to some 400 farmers and landowners.

That works out to about $250,000 for each leaseholder over the next three decades, an average of more than $8,000 a year. The actual payment varies, depending on how many turbines and transmission lines are sited on each property. Don Schurr was director of Greater Gratiot while wind farms were being constructed and began operating there. As one farmer told him, the annual lease payment from turbines “pays my taxes, pays my insurance and it [pays for] a nice vacation.”

Thanks to taxes paid by Michigan wind and solar farms, rural police and fire departments are getting new equipment and adding new shifts. Schools are being upgraded, and local roads are finally getting long-needed repairs. Farmers, meanwhile, are driving new pickups, building new barns and repairing and replacing aging farm equipment.

While all households can benefit from increased public spending, private payments to leaseholders are not universally distributed. The 400 farmers and landowners receiving lease payments from the Isabella wind farm, for example, are just a fraction of the more than 4,000 households in the seven townships where the project is located.

Sarah Mills, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has closely studied the siting of renewable energy projects in rural communities. Energy developers, she says, have started to use “good neighbor” agreements, which provide at least some payments to everyone in the footprint of a project. The compensation, she says, is “for access to wind that blows over your property.”

“There are townships in the Thumb where 85% of the property owners are participants in a wind farm,” says Mills, even if some of them have no turbines or transmission lines on their land.

Big money, big headaches

The recent influx of energy developer dollars—lots of them—into Michigan’s rural communities has real benefits, but also causes real headaches. According to Colleen Stebbins, a longtime official of Winfield Township in Montcalm County, wind farm opponents “were so afraid if I put a turbine on my property, I’d make a million, while they, with a little piece of lake property, would get nothing.”

While serving as township clerk, Stebbins declined to sign a lease with the company on her personal property, seeking to avoid any conflict of interest. Seeing benefits for the township, she voted to approve Apex’s bid to site a wind farm. As a result, opponents of the project organized a recall election and won a majority to remove her from office in November 2022.

Stebbins eventually did sign a lease with Apex, she says, “after I got recalled.”

The politics of energy production in Michigan has played out differently in three adjoining counties. Isabella, Gratiot and Montcalm are all home to hundreds of small farms, averaging a few hundred acres each. The population is overwhelmingly white—88% or more—in all three counties, with a tiny share of foreign-born residents. Donald Trump won all three counties in 2016 and again in 2020.

So why did conservative township voters in Gratiot and Isabella accept renewable energy projects, while Montcalm voters joined a rebellion against them?

Farmers vs. lakers 

One factor could be geography. Montcalm has more interior lakes than either Gratiot or Isabella. That means more homeowners own lakeside, non-farm holdings and would not receive the windfall in lease revenue from wind turbines or solar farms, sometimes by choice.

“This is just not a land use they think is appropriate, and it’s not worth it to them,” says the University of Michigan’s Sarah Mills. These homeowners, who often relocated precisely to enjoy a peaceful rural environment, are especially sensitive to disruptions that may be caused by utility-scale energy projects.

Ryan VanSolkema was elected supervisor of Winfield Township in rural Montcalm County in November of 2022, during the heart of the controversy over Apex’s proposed wind project. He won a recall election during the same 2022 campaign which saw Colleen Stebbins lose her position as township clerk. He is running, unopposed, for another term this year.

“I had just moved up here and bought a house on the lake,” says VanSolkema. “I wasn’t looking to lose 30% of the value of the home I just purchased.” Nobody wants to buy a home, he says, that looks out on 600-foot-tall wind turbines—and he’s not convinced there is any need to burn less carbon while generating electricity.

“Climate change is a hoax,” he says. “It’s just a way for government to spend money and regulate. Almost 50 years I’ve been alive, what has changed? Literally nothing.”

The intense opposition to wind and solar farms that developed in Montcalm County is far from unique. “We’ve had projects blocked all over the state,” says Ed Rivet, executive director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, a group that supports an “all-of-the-above” free market approach. The group receives backing from foundations and energy developers through the nationwide Conservative Energy Network. Rivet estimates that in the past five years, as much as two gigawatts of solar energy production in Michigan has been blocked by local activists. That’s the equivalent of two nuclear power plants worth of energy. 

Pushback is by no means confined to the state of Michigan. Researchers at Columbia Law School have found nearly 400 “laws and regulations to block or restrict renewable energy facilities” in 41 different states, with hundreds of projects encountering “significant opposition.”

Turning the tide

In Michigan, players on all sides of the controversy are recognizing the changed reality created by Public Act 233, part of a package of clean energy laws passed by Democrats and signed by Gov. Whitmer last November. It puts final siting authority for large-scale solar and wind projects in the hands of the three-member statewide Public Service Commission (PSC).

“Local authorities don’t have any impact,” says Kevon Martis. “You’ll see fewer recalls of local officials.” A home remodeler and county commissioner in Lenawee County, Martis has been involved in campaigns against renewables since he blocked a wind project in his community of Riga Township back in 2009.

After an unsuccessful petition drive this year to overturn P.A. 233 by statewide referendum, Martis is ready to try again in 2026.

On August 6, he was renominated by GOP voters for a second term as county commissioner and will face no Democratic opposition in the fall. Martis’s primary opponent, Palmyra Township Supervisor David Pixley, was endorsed by Private Property Rights PAC (PPR PAC) a new independent expenditure committee, or Super PAC.  

This summer in Michigan, PPR PAC endorsed 20 local candidates in Republican primaries in Montcalm, Ionia and other counties where there has been controversy over siting solar and wind projects. Nine of their endorsed candidates won their primary elections, some by small margins.

The PPR PAC website makes no mention of solar, wind or renewable energy. The group backs candidates, it says, who support “policies that reduce excessive regulation and oppose broad governmental overreach into property rights.”

Cabell Hobbs, treasurer of PPR PAC, is also treasurer of the Apex Clean Energy PAC. He has served in similar roles for GOP candidates, including George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and John Bolton.

Apex PAC’s election filings show contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates, a $2,500 donation to the Pennsylvania Solar PAC in 2021 and a $5,000 donation to the D.C.-based Community Solar Action Fund in 2024. There is no record of disbursements in Michigan. 

Apex’s Albert Jongewaard says he is not familiar with PPR PAC, nor are his colleagues currently working on the company’s Michigan projects. An email to PPR PAC resulted in an automatic reply from Rural Economic Development PAC (R.E.D. PAC), a Texas-based super PAC which also touts protecting private property among its top priorities.

R.E.D. PAC, where Cabell Hobbs is also treasurer, has received over $1 million from Conservatives for a Clean Energy Future (CCEF). Larry Ward, CCEF’s president and CEO, is a former political director of the Michigan Republican Party. The group was formed, he says, as the advocacy arm of the Conservative Energy Network.

“We like a whole list of energy sources,” he says, including advanced wind, solar and nuclear technologies. What his organization doesn’t like, he says, is government—or angry neighbors—“telling farmers what they can and can’t do with their property.”

CCEF is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Donations to the group are not tax deductible, and it is not required to disclose its donors. “Everyone who contributes to us,” says Ward, “would rather it be that way.”

This is the topsy-turvy world of renewable energy in Michigan. Republicans backing the conservative cause of private property rights are using a dark money loophole to help farmers and landowners participate in green energy projects, a liberal priority supported by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. These strange bedfellows, plus a few others, may now be finding a way to live together.

Although the state’s PSC has the final say to site renewable projects, utility and energy developers still have the option of trying first to work directly with local authorities. That’s taking place now—in Montcalm County, of all places. DTE Energy broke ground there in June on a 554-acre solar farm.

At a public hearing on the project last December, Evergreen Township Supervisor Andy Ross observed that with P.A. 233 in place, local governments are better off getting involved with renewable projects to make sure local concerns are addressed. These include issues like setbacks from adjacent properties, noise limits and a $5 million bond secured by DTE, which guarantees funding to decommission the project.

“If we were to deny their [DTE’s] application and they went through the state siting process, our restrictions are tighter than the state’s,” he told the Montcalm/Ionia Daily News. “What we’re working together on is way better than what the state siting would be.”

“I think there is a path forward for developers to work with local governments,” says PSC chair Dan Scripps, an energy attorney and former Democratic state representative from Northern Michigan. He was appointed to the commission in 2019 by Whitmer, who named him chair in 2020.

“I’m not going to be disappointed,” he says, “if we never get a case.”

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