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On massive blazes, debate week, and corporate sustainability
Current conditions: Typhoon Yagi was downgraded to a tropical depression after tearing through northern Vietnam • Hollywood Bowl had to cancel a show on Sunday because excessive heat knocked out power to the venue • Forecasters are watching storm Francine in the Atlantic Basin that is likely to strengthen into a hurricane.
The fast-moving Line Fire in California’s San Bernardino County has burned more than 20,500 acres and prompted evacuation orders for thousands of people. The blaze started last week, but doubled in size between Saturday and Sunday as a heat wave on the West Coast sent temperatures soaring. The neighboring town of Riverside recorded a new daily record of 110 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday. Smoke from the fire is forming clouds and storm systems that are causing lightning strikes, which can spark even more fires. The blaze remains zero percent contained, with more than 36,000 structures in its path.
In Nevada, the Davis Fire, just south of Reno, scorched 6,500 acres and forced some 20,000 people to evacuate. Schools in the area are closed. Excessive heat warnings will remain in effect across southern California and the Southwest today.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are gearing up to face off in their first 2024 presidential debate tomorrow. Trump is reportedly already planning to call the ABC News event “rigged,” and has repeatedly attacked the network in recent days. He might also use the debate to draw attention to Harris’ previous call for a ban on fracking. In 2020, Harris was opposed to fracking, but has since changed her position. “We can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash recently. But like President Biden during his tenure, Harris has to balance the interests of several important demographics on climate and energy issues. “The Harris campaign is trying to avoid being pulled between environmentalists and the Pennsylvania oil and gas sector,” Kevin Book, a managing director at consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners, told E&E News.
Massachusetts and Rhode Island on Friday selected 2,878 megawatts of wind power capacity from three projects – SouthCoast Wind (owned by Ocean Winds), New England Wind 1 (developed by Avangrid Inc.), and Vineyard Wind 2 (from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Offshore). The selections were the result of a multi-state procurement collaboration, the first in the U.S., and amount to the largest offshore wind initiative New England has seen so far. Massachusetts secured most of the capacity, with 2,678 MW. Once online, this wind power will meet nearly 20% of the state’s electricity demand and result in emissions reductions equivalent to removing 1 million gas-powered cars from the roads. “The economic ripple effects of these projects will be massive,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek. “New England’s ports in New Bedford, New London, Salem, and Providence are now booked with offshore wind tenants through 2032. These hubs will serve as launching points for wind turbines and other infrastructure that will transform the region’s energy landscape.”
CEOs planning their business strategies are prioritizing sustainability less now than they have over the last few years, The Wall Street Journalreported, citing a new report out from Bain & Co. Executives are thinking more about issues like inflation, artificial intelligence, and geopolitical uncertainty, even as 60% of consumers (and especially Gen-Z consumers) say their own levels of climate concern have grown due to extreme weather events. A recent WSJ Pro analysis found that mentions of sustainability are high in company financial reports, but low in earnings calls and marketing materials. Meanwhile, just over a third of businesses are falling short of their Scope 1 and 2 emissions targets, and more than half are missing their Scope 3 targets.
A new study suggests sharks are abandoning coral reefs due to warming ocean waters caused by climate change. Grey reef sharks tend to stay close to shallow reef habitats in the Indo-Pacific, but the research team, led by marine scientists at Lancaster University, found that warmer waters are forcing the sharks to leave for extended periods of time. Their absence could further disrupt reef ecosystems. “Faced with a trade-off, sharks must decide whether to leave the relative safety of the reef and expend greater energy to remain cool or stay on a reef in suboptimal conditions but conserve energy,” said David Jacoby, a lecturer in zoology at Lancaster University and one of the authors on the study. “We think many are choosing to move into offshore, deeper and cooler waters, which is concerning.”
Zion National Park in Southern Utah has replaced its propane shuttle buses with 30 all-electric buses. The National Park Service is working on similar zero-emission fleets at other parks including Grand Canyon, Acadia, Yosemite, Bryce Canyon, and Harpers Ferry.
NPS/Colton Johnston
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Current conditions: Severe flooding in west and central Africa has displaced nearly one million people • Brazil is choking on wildfire smoke that can be seen from space • Shanghai was struck by Typhoon Bebinca, the strongest storm to hit the city in 75 years.
Flooding across central and eastern Europe has killed at least 10 people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate. Since late last week, the slow-moving Storm Boris has dumped huge amounts of rain on the region, causing dams to burst and rivers to overflow and inundating communities in Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Parts of eastern Germany are also on alert. In the Austrian capital of Vienna, the Wien River’s water level rose from about 20 inches to more than seven feet in the course of a day. Meanwhile some mountain regions received more than three feet of snow. In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk today declared a state of natural disaster. According to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, the floods could be the worst since 2002.
Flooding in ViennaChristian Bruna/Getty Images
The European Environment Agency has warned that flooding is likely to be “one of the most serious effects from climate change in Europe over coming decades.”
Both U.S. coasts are experiencing wild weather but of very different kinds. The National Hurricane Center issued tropical storm warnings for the Carolinas as “Tropical Cyclone Eight” approaches with 50 mph winds. The system could bring up to 8 inches of rain and flash floods. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, parts of California are expecting snow. The state issued its earliest snow advisory in 20 years for the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where up to 4 inches could fall through Monday afternoon.
With COP29 now less than two months away, key players are working hard to lay the groundwork for the outcomes they’d like to see from the annual climate summit. Here are some recent developments:
A recent study finds that the risk of weather-related supply chain disruptions will rise more in the U.S. than in any other country over the next 15 years. This is because the country is starting from a pretty low baseline risk, thanks to the interconnectivity of all the states. “If a heatwave or period of extreme rainfall hits one part of the U.S., it is easily able to import goods and services from other areas,” CarbonBrief explained. But the risk won’t stay that low forever, and indeed the authors note that the U.S. “is subject to the strongest relative increases in consumption risks” through 2040 as weather shocks increase.
Tesla sold 5,175 Cybertrucks in July, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. Sales of all other EV pickups combined during that month reached 5,546. Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor and energy systems engineering expert (and co-host of Heatmap’s climate podcast Shift Key) predicted back in December that the Cybertruck would be crushed by EV pickup rivals like the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian’s R1. But now…
The U.S. Postal Service recently started rolling out its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric. The vehicles may not be beautiful, but as Paul Waldman argued for Heatmap, if you want to normalize EVs, “what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?”
Isometric is trying to become the most trusted name in the scandal-plagued carbon market.
Regulations are probably coming for the scandal-plagued voluntary carbon market. After years of mounting skepticism and reports of greenwashing, governments are now attempting to rein in the historically unchecked web of platforms, registries, protocols, and verification bodies offering ways to offset a company’s emissions that vary tremendously in price and quality. Europe has developed its own rules, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, while the Biden administration earlier this year announced a less comprehensive set of general principles. Plus, there are already mandatory carbon credit schemes around the world, such as California’s cap-and-trade program and the E.U. Emissions Trading System.
“The idea that a voluntary credit should be a different thing than a compliance credit, obviously doesn’t make sense, right?” Ryan Orbuch, Lowercarbon Capital’s carbon removal lead, told me. “You want it to be as likely as possible that the thing you’re buying today is going to count in a compliance regime.”
That’s where the carbon credit certification platform Isometric comes into play. Founded in 2022, the startup raised $25 million in its seed round last year, co-led by Lowercarbon and Plural, a European venture capital firm. It has created a rigorous, scientifically-driven standard for carbon removal credits, with the intention of becoming the benchmark that buyers, sellers, and other stakeholders can coalesce around. So whenever federal standards or compliance regimes do kick in, there will be no doubt whether Isometric-verified credits are up to snuff.
“Isometric was basically founded to say, look, the long-term solution here is obviously government and regulation, but in the meantime, this is too important to let the market just keep doing it like this,” Lukas May, chief commercial officer at Isometric, told me. He believes that the government’s role in the carbon market should mirror the financial sector, but instead of preventing insider trading or predatory lending, federal regulators would make high-level determinations on things like what types of credits count and how long carbon must be locked away to count as “permanent removal.” Platforms like Isometric (often referred to as registries) could then focus on setting more granular, scientifically specific requirements for particular methods of carbon removal.
The startup aims to separate itself from existing registries, which include Puro.earth, Verra, and the Gold Standard, in two big ways.
First is just a focus on science. May said that 15 of Isometric’s first 25 hires were scientists. Today, the company’s chief scientist is Jennifer Wilcox, who recently left her position on the leadership team at the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, housed within the U.S. Department of Energy. Other registries, he told me, are “filled with NGO types” and “policy people” who lack the technical background to, say, evaluate what types rock formations are best for the geological sequestration of bio-oil or how CO2 fluxes in the soil impact enhanced rock weathering. These types of in-the-weeds analyses are integral to establishing stringent protocols to validate the amount of carbon that’s actually been removed.
Additionally, May, Orbuch, and Khaled Helioui, a partner at Plural who led the firm’s investment in Isometric, all said the company fixes a key flaw in the voluntary carbon market —- alignment of financial incentives. Traditionally, carbon removal suppliers pay registries to certify their credits, which creates an incentive for registries to overlook lax standards. But Isometric is instead paid a flat fee by the buyers for performing verification work on a per-ton basis.
This year, Isometric verified its first credits ever, from the carbon removal companies Vaulted Deep, which collects sludgy, organic waste and deposits it underground, and Charm Industrial, which injects processed biomass into abandoned oil and gas wells. Credits from these two suppliers were sold to Frontier, the carbon-removal initiative led by the payments firm Stripe. Just last week, Frontier identified Isometric as its first and only leading credit issuer.
“What makes Isometric stand out is they’re explicitly focused on durable CDR [carbon dioxide removal],” Joanna Klitzke, Frontier’s procurement and ecosystem strategy lead, told me. “Durable” refers to the fact that Isometric’s projects must sequester CO2 for 1,000 years or more. “They’re building tech products that make data and reporting particularly easy for suppliers and for credit management,” she added.
Everyone is essentially trying to avoid another scandal like the one that engulfed rainforest carbon offsets, which were found to be largely worthless. The industry has thus been shifting away from more nebulous carbon offsets, which seek to avoid future emissions by preventing deforestation or funding renewables development, and towards more concrete, but often more expensive, forms of carbon removal — think direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, or biomass carbon removal and storage, all of which have seen a boom in investment.
“As carbon removal was emerging as a new and potentially very exciting way to do this stuff, potentially more measurable and more rigorous, we couldn’t just sit and watch the same registries do the same thing,” May told me, saying doing so would “destroy trust in the carbon removal industry before it’s even off the ground.”
In a past life, Isometric’s founder and CEO, Eamon Jubbawy, founded a digital identity verification company for the financial services industry. This gave investors confidence that he could bring his expertise in trust-building and verification services to the carbon removal space.
“It’s not a like for like, but there’s a lot of overlap in terms of actually introducing efficiency, effectiveness, and having technology really open a market,” Plural’s Helioui told me. “This is not an endeavor or an opportunity where I would have been necessarily that keen to back a first-time founder, just because of the complexity of what you need to manage,” he said. “We’re really talking about market creation.”
But May doesn’t expect Isometric to totally dominate other registries. Just like there are many private banks, May envisions an “ecosystem of high quality registries,” eventually unified around a set of federal guardrails. Until then, he believes Isometric’s role is to “set a bar that is so high that the expectation and norm in the market shifts,” thus avoiding a race to the bottom where companies are able to greenwash their image with cheap, low-quality credits.
Now, not every company can afford the highest quality credits. And because of Isometric’s 1,000-year storage requirement, many cheaper, nature-based projects, such as reforestation, are excluded from its registry, even though there’s still demand for them. Orbuch told me that Isometric will continue adding guidelines for different carbon removal pathways, as it recently did for biochar, a charcoal-like brick that locks up carbon contained within biomass.
It’s still early days, and there’s plenty of room for Isometric to grow alongside the market. After all, it’s only issued 5,350 carbon removal credits to date, while nearly two billion credits have been issued in the voluntary carbon market overall.
“The whole industry needs to be scaling up,” May told me. “So we need to, in 10 years time, be, you know, issuing and verifying hundreds of millions, if not billions, of credits annually.”
On the U.S. Postal Service’s wonderfully weird shift to electric cars
When you think of a gas-guzzler, what comes to mind is probably a gigantic pickup like the Ram 1500 TRX, which gets a combined 12 miles per gallon, or a sports car like the Ferrari Daytona, which manages a less-than-impressive 13 mpg. But you may not think about a vehicle you’ve likely seen a thousand times: the small trucks driven by most local mail carriers, known as the Grumman Long Life Vehicle. They lived up to their name, since they’ve been in service since the mid-80s; the newest of them were built 30 years ago. But they get an abysmal 9 miles per gallon, burning fuel by the tankful and spewing emissions as they go about their appointed rounds.
So after a long and winding journey to a replacement for the LLV, the first of the Postal Service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric — just hit the road. And they are beautiful.
Oshkosh Defense
This may not be a widely shared opinion. Indeed, some will find the NGDV downright ugly, and they won’t exactly be wrong. But the new postal truck’s weird appearance — many have remarked that it looks like a duck, or something from a Richard Scarry book — is what, I predict, will make it iconic. In addition to bringing a touch of whimsy to your neighborhood, the NGDV will advance the cause of vehicle electrification much more than you might expect.
Postal delivery vehicles were always a no-brainer for electrification: They do a lot of stopping and starting, they follow fixed routes so they can charge at a single location, and since the existing fleet uses so much gas, electrifying them will make a real dent in the nation’s emissions.
The old trucks didn’t just add to our nation’s carbon emissions, they got no love from the workers who drove them. If you’ve noticed your mail carrier sweating profusely as they bring letters to your door in the summer, it’s not just because they have to carry that heavy bag up and down the street. It’s also because their creaky, uncomfortable vehicles have no air conditioning. In 2024.
“It felt like heaven blowing in my face,” said one carrier after trying out the NGDV, which does indeed have air conditioning, along with many of the safety features, including backup cameras, antilock brakes, and airbags, that are common in modern cars but the LLVs lacked. The new truck also looks unusual because it solves many of the problems the old vehicles pose for letter carriers. The truck had to be tall enough to allow them to stand up in the back, so they won’t have to hunch over the way they do now. It had to be low to the ground so they can get in and out easily dozens of times in a shift. It had to have a big enough windshield for the shortest and tallest carriers to see out comfortably.
Oshkosh Defense
All that meant that the NGDV wound up looking like no other vehicle. Once they are fully deployed — the current plan is to put 60,000 into service over the next few years — their unique profile will become familiar to everyone. And it’s important that this strange electric vehicle will be associated with the Postal Service. Because people love the Postal Service.
That might be a surprise given familiar complaints about lines at the post office. But it turns out that when surveys are taken, the Postal Service always ranks at or near the top of public approval among federal agencies. A recent Pew Research poll put the USPS’s approval at 72%, behind only the National Park Service. Gallup polls show them at the top. A 2020 survey by the department’s Inspector General found 91% of respondents saying they had a positive view of the USPS.
Perhaps people have a sense that what the Postal Service accomplishes is nothing short of miraculous. They move over 300 million pieces of mail every day, and deliver to 167 million addresses. They’ll pick up a letter at your door, take it anywhere in the country by land or air or water, and deliver it right to your Aunt Myrtle in the space of a few days — and not for $50 or $100, but for 73 cents. It costs the same whether that letter is going to Atlanta or Alakanuk. As U.S. law states, the purpose of the Postal Service is “to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people.” The USPS is nothing less than a national treasure.
Maybe people appreciate that, or maybe it’s just that most of us like getting mail, and our mail carriers are part of our communities (and usually friendly). In any case, the new electric vehicles will be associated with all the positive feelings people have about the USPS.
Which is why it’s fine — and maybe even better — that the NGDV is odd-looking, or even ugly (but in a charming way). One prevailing theory about EV adoption — advanced by Tesla’s Elon Musk and embodied in other vehicles like the Ford F-150 Lightning — is that the way to get people to buy EVs is to make EVs that are cool. It’s a valid perspective, but another way to think about the long-term goal of transportation electrification is that EVs ought to be in as many places and as many forms as possible. If you want to normalize them, what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?
It may be a while before you spot an NGDV in your neighborhood; among other things, it will take time to install the charging infrastructure at all the postal facilities necessary to electrify the entire delivery fleet. After all, one of the things that makes the Postal Service such a vital part of our national life is that it touches Americans, and delivers to them, no matter how far-flung they are. At least at first, we may be more likely to see electric delivery vehicles in big cities than in remote rural areas.
But before long, the NGDV could become the most widely recognized EV in the country, and one that people associate with service, community, efficiency, and patriotism. And yes, they look weird. Which is part of what makes them great.