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♫ It’s getting hot in here, so close up all your domes ♫
Home runs ain’t the half of it.
Last week, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society issued a widely cited report that found global warming is “juicing” baseballs. The result is an extra 50 or so home runs per year in the major leagues. “It’s basic physics,” The Associated Press explained. “When air heats up, molecules move faster and away from each other, making the air less dense. Baseballs launched off a bat go farther through thinner air because there’s less resistance to slow the ball.”
Baseball fans have long been aware that hot weather makes for more home runs, so it follows that increasing temperatures will have an impact on the game in the years ahead. But MLB has more to worry about than the game becoming boring again because of too many dingers. Here are a few more ways climate change could irrevocably alter the future of America’s favorite past time:
We’ve already covered how the ball will behave differently off the bat. But what about out of the hand?
Heat and high humidity mean less air density, which in turn causes “fastballs to be faster, curveballs to curve less, and spin rates of pitches to be higher,” wrote Lawrence Rocks for SABR’s “Future of Baseball” issue in 2021. Of course, “these factors will cause pitchers to change their usage percentages on their pitch selection.”
As lowland parks grow hotter, we can expect them to behave more like the famously thin-aired Coors Field in Denver — particularly Atlanta, Kansas City, and Houston, which have among the lowest air densities of the Major League stadiums. Heat and humidity will cause baseballs to move more quickly out of the hand while the reduction in the Magnus force will cause them to break more poorly. And if fastballs get faster and curveballs break less, you can naturally expect to see more heaters in the game — and potentially more strikeouts as a result.
At the time of first pitch in Seattle, the Air Quality Index was 220. During the nine innings that followed, it would peak at 240 — more than twice the satisfactory level and “unhealthy for all groups.”
The year was 2020, and wildfires up and down the West Coast were making the empty stadiums even more apocalyptic. Shortly after smoke turned the Bay Area a dystopian orange, MLB decided to move home games from Seattle to San Francisco’s Oracle Park — because the air quality in the Pacific Northwest at that point was too unsafe for athletes.
\u201cA look outside the San Francisco Giants' stadium today.\u201d— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) 1599694410
It won’t be the last time baseball games are moved or even postponed due to air quality from fires. In 2022, perhaps against better judgment, the Mariners played the ALDS against the Astros when the AQI was 158. Though the unwritten rule is to postpone games when the AQI tops 200, players are beginning to push back, saying — rightfully — that prolonged exposure to inhaling smoke is dangerous. “It’s not like if you’re below 200, everything is fine, and if you’re above 200, everybody is severely affected,” a public health official pointed out to The Athletic. “There’s a whole continuum.”
If the Oakland Athletics move to Las Vegas, they’re all but certain to become the ninth Major League baseball team with at least the ability — if not the necessity — to play indoors.
In addition to the fully enclosed Tropicana Dome in Tampa Bay, seven stadiums currently have retractable roofs. And it is in the warmest, sunniest markets where those roofs most often remain closed: “Miami … played under an open roof just five times in the past two seasons — combined,” Fox Weather reports. The Rangers, meanwhile, replaced their only-26-year-old ballpark in 2019 because it had gotten literally too hot to play in Texas without air conditioning.
It’s not uncommon for the remaining open-air ballparks to top 95 degrees in the summer — a miserable experience for players and fans alike. Without covering more ballparks, injuries could climb and attendance could drop. “People might just say forget about it. I’m not going to a baseball game. It’s 105 degrees,” Brad Humphreys, professor of economics at West Virginia University, told Capital News Service.
Triple-A baseball introduced electronic strike zones this season, fueling speculation that the controversial robo-ump system could be coming to the Major Leagues next. But there is one big reason in favor of electronic strike zones that doesn’t often get mentioned in the debate: climate change.
A recent study found that “umpires call pitches less accurately in uncomfortable temperatures, with performance at its worst in extreme heat conditions,” Monmouth University writes. Incorrect calls were made at a rate of about 1% worse when temperatures topped 95 degrees. And while that might seem insignificant, “it is non-trivial for this high-revenue, high-stakes industry,” the study’s author, Monmouth associate professor of economics Eric Fesselmeyer, said. “Moreover, high temperatures cause an even greater decrease in accuracy on close-call pitches along the edges of the strike zone.”
Aggression and violence rise with the temperatures. In one study, violent crimes went up by as much as 5.7% on days with a maximum daily temperature above 85 degrees, and as much as 10% on days above about 88.
As dugouts and diamonds get hotter, tempers will too. But there is another reason to believe there will be more bench-clearing brawls beyond heat-induced short-fuses. According to a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1991, “a positive and significant relationship was found between temperature and the number of hit batters per game, even when potentially confounding variables having nothing to do with aggression were partialed out.”
Similarly, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business found in 2011 that “pitchers whose teammates get hit by a pitch are more likely to retaliate and plunk an opposing batter when the temperature reaches 90 degrees than when it is cooler.” Curiously, if no one has been hit in a game, the study found “high temperatures have little effect on a pitcher’s behavior.” As one of the researchers put it, “heat affects a specific form of aggression. It increases retribution.”
Hurricane Ian — the category 4 hurricane that slammed southwest Florida last September — was the state’s costliest storm, inflicting $109 billion in damage including “totally” destroying 900 structures in Fort Meyers Beach alone. Among the damages: CenturyLink Sports Complex, the spring training facility of the Minnesota Twins; Fenway South, the Boston Red Sox’s facility; and Charlotte Sports Park, the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring training home, which sustained damage so extensive that the team had to find another stadium to practice in during the 2023 spring training season.
The lasting damage of the storm extends beyond the physical: “Hurricane Ian’s impact on Lee County likely played a role in depressing the crowds at Red Sox and Twins games this year,” Fort Myers News-Press reports.
There are no murmurs of moving the Grapefruit League’s spring training facilities — yet. But already the rising sea levels and storms of Florida are ruling out new stadium locations, including at least one potential regular-season home for the Rays. “Sites that once appeared to be great places to build a ballpark are now expected to be underwater,” the team president said. With climate already costing teams money and fans, as well as being a deciding factor in new builds, the Grapefruit League could prudently decide to uproot for higher grounds.
Homebuyers are taking into account the future climate conditions of potential properties, and if MLB is wise, it will do the same when considering team expansion.
From a climate standpoint, it already seems egregious to move a team to a desert city that is running out of drinkable water in the summer, though the Oakland A’s potential relocation to Las Vegas is still very much on the table. But when MLB looks at locations to expand to — Portland, Mexico City, North Carolina, Nashville, Montreal, and Vancouver have also been floated — the climate calculus becomes ever more important.
In 60 years, Portland will have a climate similar to Sacramento, complete with the threat of wildfire smoke. Mexico City is getting hotter, drier, and sinking. Charlotte and Raleigh will eventually “resemble the Florida panhandle, specifically Tallahassee, which is 12.6 °F warmer and 10.6% to 14.4% wetter than winter in Charlotte and Raleigh. Nashville is not too far, with Mobile, Alabama serving as its closest projection,” Fangraphs writes in an assessment of the future of ballparks in the climate crisis.
Unsurprisingly, with an eye for the future, it is the northernmost cities that look like the best options to withstand climate change impacts: “Vancouver and Montreal could look toward current day T-Mobile Park and Citizens Bank Park as examples of how to keep fans comfortable during games.”
Over the course of 12 months between 2019 and 2020, 10% of MLB teams switched from real grass to turf. “The three stadiums that replaced their grass share a lot in common,” wrote The Wall Street Journal at the time: “They play in cities with extreme weather and have retractable roofs.”
In Arizona, for example, real grass required sunlight — and thus an open roof — until between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., which meant that players often worked out before games in temperatures of 110 degrees or more. By the time fans arrived, the building would still be sweltering, air conditioning not having yet kicked in. But by switching to turf, “the roof can remain closed all summer.”
Switching to turf also eliminates the demands of watering: Conservatively, about 62,500 gallons of water a week are required to maintain an average field, an amount 89 homes would use in the same amount of time. Though that water is likely negligible in the grand scheme of things, it’s important for teams to take “social responsibility” by “walking the walk,” Diamondbacks president and CEO Derrick Hall told The Associated Press.
Turf remains controversial — it can affect the bounce of balls and result in higher rates of injuries. Recent advances in turf technology, though, are making it more appealing for teams and the planet.
Anyone who’s ever watched nine innings of live baseball knows the kind of mess fans leave behind: peanut shell piles; beer cups; burger trays; plastic ice cream bowls shaped like hats; abandoned bobbleheads. Overall, baseball audiences create more than 1,000 tons of waste every season, according to the Green Sports Alliance.
A growing number of stadiums are now aspiring to contribute less to landfills, including by using compostable serving items and reducing food waste. But one place waste is still frequently overlooked is in promotional giveaways.
Every year, MLB gives away around four million bobbleheads in addition to other tchotchkes like branded visors, T-shirts, sunglasses, and bags. While some of these end up as treasured pieces of home collections, the vast majority are junk destined for landfills.
Though teams show no sign of forgoing giveaways anytime soon, the more environmentally conscious parks may begin to consider new ways of reducing their waste — including by curbing handouts of cheaply made petroleum products and environmentally taxing garments that no one actually needs.
Every year, athletes end up on the Injured List for reasons ranging from benign to ridiculous. Now there is a new reason to be pulled from a game: heat illness. During one 2018 game at Wrigley Field with a heat index of 107, four players ultimately left the field for temperature-related causes, including three who had to be treated with IV fluids. During another game in 2021, a 28-year-old pitcher vomited on the mound in New York City. Diagnosis? Heat exhaustion.
Normal sports injuries also spike as it gets warmer. “We always had what seemed to be a lot more soft-tissue leg injuries than some of the other clubs. Hamstrings, calf injuries, from guys running the bases,” a former Rangers trainer told The Atlantic in 2016, prior to the construction of the team’s new air-conditioned stadium. “Our staff attributed that to the excessive heat and the fatigue.”
The prevalence of naturally occurring injuries could go up too because as players get dehydrated, their brain, thought capacity, and reflexes “are affected and the player is not able to react immediately on the field,” a 2021 study by the International Journal of Physical Education found. “The player will be injured due to a fall or collision with another player or being hit by a ball.”
Tragically, rising temperatures also are known to contribute to an increased number of deaths, a pattern already observable in high school football. Baseball fans and minor league athletes have already died due to heat-related causes — an awful pattern that isn’t likely to abate.
In 2017, the mercury during the first game of the World Series in Los Angeles hit 103 degrees after 5 p.m.; the same year, the Oakland A’s Triple-A affiliate played in 111-degree heat in Las Vegas. On average, the temperature across the 27 Major League Baseball cities has risen over two degrees since 1970. And “the difference in home run rates between a 90-degree day and a 40-degree day is roughly equivalent to the difference between hitting in Citizens Bank Park” — which is small — “versus Citi Field,” which is comparatively huge, ESPN reports.
In our hotter, damper future, baseball will be a markedly different game than it was 50 years ago — or even now. Heat will affect players’ reflexes and focus. Balls will move differently through thinner, warmer air. Fielding could change ever so slightly as turf becomes more common, and pitchers might switch up their pitches as electronic strike zones come into use and curveballs become less effective.
All good statistical comparisons need context, and that is especially true in the ever-changing sport of baseball. But in the next century of the sport, it is all but certain that the literal environment of the games — from the weather to the air density to the AQI — will be a necessary asterisk beside unusual home runs and IL designations. One day, announcers may even reminisce about “open air” stadiums from their climate-controlled booths during downtime on broadcasts. Perhaps we’ll even have a name for the days of comparatively thicker air: the “cool-ball era.”
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On budget negotiations, Climeworks, and DOE grants
Current conditions: It’s peak storm season in the U.S., with severe weather in the forecast for at least the next six days in the Midwest and East• San Antonio, Texas, is expected to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit today• Monsoon rains have begun in Sri Lanka.
The House Budget Committee meeting to prepare the reconciliation bill for a floor vote as early as next week appears to be a go for Friday, despite calls from some Republicans to delay the session. At least three GOP House members, including two members of the Freedom Caucus, have threatened to vote no on the budget because a final score for the Energy and Commerce portion of the bill, which includes cuts to Medicaid, won’t be ready from the Congressional Budget Office until next week. That is causing a “math problem” for Republicans, Politico writes, because the Budget Committee “is split 21-16 in favor of Republicans, and Democrats are expecting full attendance,” meaning Republicans can “only lose two votes if they want to move forward with the megabill Friday.” Republican Brandon Gill of Texas is currently out on paternity leave, further reducing the margin for disagreement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is also contending with discontent in the ranks over cuts to clean energy tax credits. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still pretty bad,” New York Republican Andrew Garbarino, a co-chair of the House Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told Politico on Thursday. But concerns about the cuts, which would heavily impact Republican state economies and jobs, do not appear to be a “red line” for many others, including Georgia’s Buddy Carter, whose district benefits from Inflation Reduction Act credits for a Hyundai car and battery plant that is among the targets for elimination. You can learn more about the cuts Republicans are proposing to the IRA in our coverage here.
The Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks is preparing for significant cuts to its workforce, citing the larger economic landscape and the Trump administration’s lack of consistent support. The company currently has 498 employees, but is undergoing a consultation process, indicating it is looking to cut more than 10% of its workforce at once, SwissInfo.ch reports. “Our financial resources are limited,” Climeworks’ co-founder and managing director Jan Wurzbacher said in comments on Swiss TV.
Though Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a known proponent of carbon capture, and there had been excitement in the industry that Trump’s attempts to expedite federal permitting would benefit carbon storage sites, the administration has also hollowed out the Department of Energy’s carbon removal team, my colleague Katie Brigham has reported. The ongoing funding cuts and uncertainty have made it difficult to get information from the government that could affect Climework’s Project Cypress in Louisiana, although Wurzbacher stressed that “we are not currently aware that our project would be stopped.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced in a Thursday memo that the department will be reviewing at least $15 billion worth of grants awarded to “power grid and manufacturing supply chain projects” under the Biden administration, Reuters reports. “With this process, the Department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright said in his statement.
The memo goes on to note that the DOE plans to prioritize “large-scale commercial projects that require more detailed information from the awardees for the initial phase of this review, but this process may extend to other DOE program offices as the reviews progress.” Projects that don’t meet the DOE’s standards could be denied, as could projects of grantees who fail to “respond to information requests within the provided time frame, does not respond to follow-up questions in a timely manner.” As of last week, Wright told lawmakers, “we’ve canceled zero” existing projects so far, E&E News writes; the agency will reportedly be reviewing at least 179 different awards during its audit.
The number of National Weather Service offices ending 24-hour operations and severe weather alerts is increasing. On Thursday, The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that California’s Sacramento and Hanford offices, which provide information to more than 7 million people in the Central Valley, have been forced to reduce service due to “critically reduced staffing.”
Eliminating 24-hour service is especially concerning for the Central Valley and surrounding foothills, where around-the-clock weather updates can be critical. “These are offices that have both dealt with major wildfire episodes most of the past 10 years, and we are now entering fire season,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told the Chronicle. “That’s a big, big problem.” Swain additionally shared on LinkedIn a map he’d put together of regions in the U.S. that no longer have full-service weather coverage, including “a substantial chunk of Tornado Alley during peak tornado season and the entirety of Alaska’s vast North Slope region.” The NWS is additionally seeking to fill 155 vacancies in coastal states that could face risks as the Atlantic hurricane season begins at the end of the month, The Washington Post reports. An estimated 500 of 4,200 NWS employees have been fired or taken early retirements since the start of Trump’s term.
Heatmap’s “most fascinating” EV of 2025 just got pushed back to 2026. The Ram 1500 Ramcharger — which has a 140-mile electric range as well as a V6 engine attached to a generator to power the car when the battery runs out — is now set to launch in the first quarter of next year due to “extending the quality validation period,” Crain’s Detroit Business reported this week. Parent company Stellantis also pushed back the launch of its fully electric Ram 1500 REV until summer 2027, with a planned model year of 2028. “Our plan ensures we are offering customers a range of trucks with flexible powertrain options that best meet their needs,” Stellantis spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Crain’s in an email. Though you now have even longer to wait, you can read more about the car Jesse Jenkins calls “brilliant” here.
GMC
The 2026 GMC Hummer EV just got even more ridiculous. “Thanks to the new Carbon Fiber Edition,” the 9,000-pound car “can zoom to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds,” InsideEVs reports.
A conversation with Jillian Blanchard of Lawyers for Good Government about the heightened cost of permitting delays
This week I chatted with Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice with Lawyers for Good Government, an organization that has been supporting beneficiaries of the Inflation Reduction Act navigate the uncertainties surrounding tax credits and grant programs under the Trump administration. The reason I wanted to chat with Jillian is simple: the IRA is under threat for the first time under a Republican Congress. I wanted to understand how solar and wind projects could be impacted by the House Republican reconciliation bill and putting IRA tax credits in doubt. I learned a lot.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay, Jillian, what’s the topline here? How would the GOP reconciliation bill impact individual projects’ development?
There are big chunks of the reconciliation bill that will have dramatic impacts on project development, including language that would repeal or phase out bipartisan and popular tax credits in a way that would make it very, very difficult to invest in projects. I can get into the weeds next.
But it’s worth saying first – the group of programs aside from tax credits that [House Republicans] would repeal represents every single part of America. Hundreds of projects that will not go forward if these programs are not going well. And they have several legally obligated grants that EPA has already mucked up in a litany of ways. But what they’re proposing to do is to pull the rug out from under those programs. On top of that they want to pull any unobligated funding out.
I think it’s extremely misrepresentative to say these are not big cuts. They’re significant cuts to clean air and clean water across the board.
Help me get into the weeds about how phasing out the credits will make it harder to invest in a project.
Right now, a bank might want to invest a certain amount of money in a clean energy project because they know on the back end they can get 30% or 40% back on their investment. A return through tax credits. They can bank on that, because tax credits are a guarantee.
Was that an intentional pun? “Bank”?
Yeah, it is. I love a good pun. You opened the floodgates, that was a mistake.
But anyway, the program itself was supposed to be around until at least 2032 and the bank could bank on those tax credits. That’s a big runway, because projects could get delayed and you could lock in the credit as soon as you started construction.
Now they’re doing a phase-out approach where if your project is not placed into service before a certain date, you don’t avoid the phase out. You don’t get any protections if you’re starting your project now or next year. It has to be placed in service before 2028 or else your project may not be eligible. You are constructing it, you are financing it, but then through no fault of your own – a storm or whatever – then suddenly that project is no longer entitled to get 30% or 40% back.
That’s a big risk. And banks don’t like risk.
Opposition on the ground also delays projects the way a storm does. Would this empower those opponents?
Oh, totally. Totally. If anyone wants to fight a project, a bank might be even less likely to invest in it. The NIMBYs for that particular project become a risk.
What would you tell a developer at this moment who is wondering about the uncertainty around the IRA?
I would tell them that now is the time to speak up. If they want to stay in this business and make sure their energy stays as low-cost as it already is, they need to speak up right now, no matter what their political party affiliation is. Make it clear solar isn’t going away, wind isn’t going away, storage isn’t going away. These are markets America needs to be competitive with the rest of the world.
Investors are only just now starting to digest what the proposed cuts will mean, especially for energy storage.
Is Wall Street too sanguine about the House of Representatives’ proposal to gut the Inflation Reduction Act? When the House Ways and Means Committee unveiled its language on the law on Monday — phasing out tax credits, implementing strict restrictions on business relationships with Chinese companies, and altering when projects are eligible for credits — some investors responded to the cutbacks by driving up the prices of some clean energy stocks.
The residential solar company Sunrun traded up on Tuesday by 8.6%, and the American solar manufacturer First Solar was up over 22%. (Stock movements on Monday were largely in response to the pause of the U.S.-China trade war, also announced that morning.)
“The early drafts of a Republican tax and spending bill weren’t as bad for renewables as feared,” wrote Barron’s. Morgan Stanley analysts used the same language — “not as bad as feared” — in a note to clients on the text. “Industry was bracing for way worse,” Don Schneider, the deputy head of public policy for Piper Sandler and a former Republican staffer on the Ways and Means Committee, wrote on X.
While many analysts — and, to be honest, journalists at Heatmap — have issued dire warnings about how the various provisions of the Ways and Means language could together make much of the IRA essentially impossible to use, even before the tax credits phase out, investors on Wall Street and in Washington seem to have shrugged them off. Some level of cutting was all but inevitable, and “not as bad as it could have been” is reason enough to celebrate — plus there’s also “it’ll probably change, anyway.”
There’s something to this. A group ofmoderate Republicans criticized the language on Wednesday as too restrictive, specifically citing changes to three overarching features of the tax credits: when projects would be eligible for tax credits, where companies are able to source components and materials, and whether companies are allowed to freely buy and sell tax credits generated by their projects. (Wouldn’t you know it, these complaints largely echo what Heatmap has written in the past few days.)
In the Senate, meanwhile, Republican Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, said that the text as written would be too damaging to advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal generation. The phase-out timelines in the Ways and Means language are “too short for truly new technologies,” Cramer told Politico.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me that he expects the bill to evolve in a way to meet the concerns of Senate Republicans like Cramer.
“Given considerations both political and procedural, like the more flexible reconciliation instructions Senate Finance is afforded relative to House Ways and Means and the disproportionate impact current text entails for technologies Republicans traditionally favor, like nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower, I think it’s fair to say that this text will change over the coming weeks,” he said.
Finally, days after the Ways and Means committee made its thinking public, Wall Street seems to be catching on to the implications. The new foreign entities of concern rules pose a particularly huge danger to the renewable energy sector, according to Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith, and especially to energy storage, which would be the key provider of reliability on a renewable-heavy grid. Energy storage looks to account for almost 30% of new generator additions this year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
“We think the market got it wrong for storage,” Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients. The market has yet to “digest and fully interpret the implications of proposed tariff and tax policy, which as currently written do not bode well for storage,” he said. The foreign sourcing language “is more restrictive than initially thought, with some industry stakeholders calling the proposal a near repeal on IRA.”
The storage supply chain is intensely entangled with China. Many companies, including Tesla,have been forced to disclose to investors just how reliant they are on China for their storage businesses.
China alone accounted for 70% of battery imports in 2024, according to industry analysts at BloombergNEF, over $14 billion worth. About a quarter of the metals used in battery manufacturing — especially graphite — came from China, BNEF figures show. For specific battery chemistry like lithium iron phosphate, which is popular for stationary storage products, the supply chain is essentially 100% Chinese.
Wall Street revenue and profit estimates “do not adequately capture the extent of risks” facing the U.S. storage industry, Dumoulin-Smith wrote. The storage company Fluence’s stock fell around 1.5% today, and is down over 5.5% since close of trading on Monday, as the market began to digest the House language.
It is possible that the foreign sourcing rules will be loosened and phase-outs for tax credits and transferability lengthened, Venkatakrishnan told me, but not in a way that would endanger the overall structure of the bill. Cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act are a key source of revenue for the Republican bill-writers to ensure as many of the tax cuts they want can fit within the budgetary scope they’ve given themselves.
“Any adjustments will be made with an eye toward ensuring budgetary offsets are sufficient to enable success of the broader enterprise,” Venkatakrishnan said. In other words, as much as some lawmakers may want to see these tax credits preserved, ultimately, they’ve got to pass a bill to ensure Trump’s tax cuts stick around.