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Climate

Volvo and Polestar Break Up

On Tesla and antifreeze, otters and crabs, and more.

Briefing image.

AM Briefing: An EV Breakup

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: “The largest storm of the season” is scheduled to make landfall tomorrow in California, which is fresh off one storm that dumped water across the state. The Spanish region of Catalonia has declared a state of emergency over its worst drought on record. Residents are protesting unprecedented water shortages in Mexico City, which is struggling after years of little rain.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Volvo splits with Polestar

Yesterday, Swedish automaker Volvo announced it is pulling funding from Polestar, its EV arm, which has struggled to gain a foothold in the market. As Jennifer Mossalgue reports in Electrek, Polestar is bleeding cash — it announced plans to cut 15% of its workforce last week, and needs a billion-dollar cash infusion over the next year to stay in business. Polestar will instead become the purview of Volvo parent company Geely, owned by Chinese billionaire Li Shufu.

2. Tesla settles lawsuit over water pollution

Yesterday, a judge in California's San Joaquin County ordered Tesla to pay $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by more than two dozen counties, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, for mislabeling hazardous waste and sending it to landfills that could not accept the particular substances, including “paint materials, brake fluids, used batteries, antifreeze and diesel fuel.” The lawsuit alleged that at least 101 facilities violated California’s waste management laws, including the factory in Fremont. The electric vehicle-maker has had multiple previous tangles with the Environmental Protection Agency over pollution from its factories.

“While electric vehicles may benefit the environment, the manufacturing and servicing of these vehicles still generates many harmful waste streams,” said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins in a press release. “Today’s settlement against Tesla, Inc. serves to provide a cleaner environment for citizens throughout the state by preventing the contamination of our precious natural resources when hazardous waste is mismanaged and unlawfully disposed.”

3. Democrats take on AI’s environmental impact

Sen. Markey at a Capitol Hill rally in 2021.Sen. Markey at a Capitol Hill rally in 2021.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A group of Democratic lawmakers, led by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, introduced a bill that would direct the EPA to study the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence. It also asks the National Institute of Standards and Technology to set up a system to both measure and voluntarily report those impacts. AI, like crypto mining, is energy-intensive, but it’s difficult to tell just how that energy use impacts the environment without any measurement or reporting mechanism in place.

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  • 4. Rooftop solar’s woes continue

    Earlier this week the software company Aurora Solar laid off 20% of its 500-person staff, about a year after it raised $200 million in a Series D round.

    “Like many other companies in the solar industry, we’ve felt the effects of larger macroeconomic challenges, including higher interest rates and the impact of NEM 3.0 in California,” Aurora Solar told Tim De Chant at TechCrunch.

    NEM 3.0 is California’s latest iteration of a net metering regulation. Under the new structure, which came into effect in April of last year, compensation rates for solar customers in the state dropped by about 75%, which means rooftop solar is no longer the steal deal it once was.

    The news is the latest in a series of signs that the rooftop solar industry is in a tough spot at the moment — as Alana Semuels wrote in Time last week, more than 100 residential solar-related companies declared bankruptcy in 2023 alone.

    5. Otters are inadvertent erosion fighters

    Sea otters are playing a crucial role in stopping estuaries in California from eroding away, according to a delightfully-titled article in Nature. After conservation efforts succeeded in helping sea otter populations in the state rebound from the brink of extinction, researchers found that the animals were inadvertently stopping salt marshes like Monterey Bay’s Elkhorn Slough from washing away by eating the crabs that were picking at vegetation that keeps the sandy banks of the marsh together. Erosion in the areas where otters returned slowed from 30 centimeters a year to 10 centimeters a year.

    “It’s remarkable when you think about it,” Jane Watson, a community ecologist at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, Canada, told Nature’s Jude Coleman. “You can have a single animal, the sea otter, come in and through predation actually mitigate the effects of erosion.”

    THE KICKER

    It’s cloudy with a chance of flurries in Punxsutawney, PA, where the eponymous rodent is scheduled to make his prediction for Groundhog Day, and The Washington Post’s Kasha Patel has a story about it told entirely in verse. Punxsutawney Phil, Patel notes, has a bit of competition these days:

    “The National Weather Service issues seasonal outlooks based on computer models and science. They do not have a groundhog for reliance.”

    Yellow

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    Energy

    How the Interconnection Queue Could Make Qualifying for Tax Credits Next to Impossible

    A renewable energy project can only start construction if it can get connected to the grid.

    Power lines, money, the Capitol, and a map.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    The clock is ticking for clean energy developers. With the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar developers have to start construction (whatever that means) in the next 12 months and be operating no later than the end of 2027 to qualify for federal tax credits.

    But projects can only get built if they can get connected to the grid. Those decisions are often out of the hands of state, local, or even federal policymakers, and are instead left up to utilities, independent system operators, or regional trading organizations, which then have to study things like the transmission infrastructure needed for the project before they can grant a project permission to link up.

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    Green
    Climate

    AM Briefing: NOAA Nominee Vows to Fill Forecaster Vacancies

    On Neil Jacobs’ confirmation hearing, OBBBA costs, and Saudi Aramco

    Would-be NOAA Administrator Vows to Fill Forecaster Vacancies
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit in central and eastern Texas, complicating recovery efforts after the floodsMore than 10,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern China due to flooding from the remnants of Typhoon DanasMebane, North Carolina, has less than two days of drinking water left after its water treatment plant sustained damage from Tropical Storm Chantal.

    THE TOP FIVE

    1. Trump’s nominee to head NOAA vows to fill staffing vacancies

    Neil Jacobs, President Trump’s nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, fielded questions from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday about how to prevent future catastrophes like the Texas floods, Politico reports. “If confirmed, I want to ensure that staffing weather service offices is a top priority,” Jacobs said, even as the administration has cut more than 2,000 staff positions this year. Jacobs also told senators that he supports the president’s 2026 budget, which would further cut $2.2 billion from NOAA, including funding for the maintenance of weather models that accurately forecast the Texas storms. During the hearing, Jacobs acknowledged that humans have an “influence” on the climate, and said he’d direct NOAA to embrace “new technologies” and partner with industry “to advance global observing systems.”

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    Climate Tech

    What’s Left of the LPO After the One Big Beautiful Bill?

    Some of the Loan Programs Office’s signature programs are hollowed-out shells.

    Blurred money.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    With a stroke of President Trump’s Sharpie, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law, stripping the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office of much of its lending power. The law rescinds unobligated credit subsidies for a number of the office’s key programs, including portions of the $3.6 billion allocated to the Loan Guarantee Program, $5 billion for the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, $3 billion for the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, and $75 million for the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.

    Just three years ago, the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged LPO, originally established in 2005 to help stand up innovative new clean energy technologies that weren’t yet considered bankable for the private sector, expanding its lending authority to roughly $400 billion. While OBBBA leaves much of the office’s theoretical lending authority intact, eliminating credit subsidies means that it no longer really has the tools to make use of those dollars.

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