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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

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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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    AM Briefing

    Exxon Counterattacks

    On China’s rare earths, Bill Gates’ nuclear dream, and Texas renewables

    An Exxon sign.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa exploded in intensity over the warm Caribbean waters and has now strengthened into a major storm, potentially slamming into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica as a Category 5 in the coming days • The Northeast is bracing for a potential nor’easter, which will be followed by a plunge in temperatures of as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit lower than average • The northern Australian town of Julia Creek saw temperatures soar as high as 106 degrees.

    THE TOP FIVE

    1. Exxon sued California

    Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California late Friday on the grounds that two landmark new climate laws violate the oil giant’s free speech rights, The New York Times reported. The two laws would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas pollution created by the use of their products, so-called Scope 3 emissions. “The statutes compel Exxon Mobil to trumpet California’s preferred message even though Exxon Mobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided,” Exxon complained through its lawyers. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the statutes “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.” He condemned the lawsuit, calling it “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”

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    The Aftermath

    How to Live in a Fire-Scarred World

    The question isn’t whether the flames will come — it’s when, and what it will take to recover.

    Wildfire aftermath.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    In the two decades following the turn of the millennium, wildfires came within three miles of an estimated 21.8 million Americans’ homes. That number — which has no doubt grown substantially in the five years since — represents about 6% of the nation’s population, including the survivors of some of the deadliest and most destructive fires in the country’s history. But it also includes millions of stories that never made headlines.

    For every Paradise, California, and Lahaina, Hawaii, there were also dozens of uneventful evacuations, in which regular people attempted to navigate the confusing jargon of government notices and warnings. Others lost their homes in fires that were too insignificant to meet the thresholds for federal aid. And there are countless others who have decided, after too many close calls, to move somewhere else.

    By any metric, costly, catastrophic, and increasingly urban wildfires are on the rise. Nearly a third of the U.S. population, however, lives in a county with a high or very high risk of wildfire, including over 60% of the counties in the West. But the shape of the recovery from those disasters in the weeks and months that follow is often that of a maze, featuring heart-rending decisions and forced hands. Understanding wildfire recovery is critical, though, for when the next disaster follows — which is why we’ve set out to explore the topic in depth.

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    The Aftermath

    The Surprisingly Tricky Problem of Ordering People to Leave

    Wildfire evacuation notices are notoriously confusing, and the stakes are life or death. But how to make them better is far from obvious.

    Wildfire evacuation.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    How many different ways are there to say “go”? In the emergency management world, it can seem at times like there are dozens.

    Does a “level 2” alert during a wildfire, for example, mean it’s time to get out? How about a “level II” alert? Most people understand that an “evacuation order” means “you better leave now,” but how is an “evacuation warning” any different? And does a text warning that “these zones should EVACUATE NOW: SIS-5111, SIS-5108, SIS-5117…” even apply to you?

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