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Climate

Will 2025 Be Another Year of Extreme Heat?

On weather projections, deadly EV attacks, and hydrogen tax credits

Will 2025 Be Another Year of Extreme Heat?
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A series of Arctic blasts hitting the U.S. could make for the coldest January since 2011 • Power has been restored in Puerto Rico after a massive New Year’s Eve blackout • Temperatures will get down to about 43 degrees Fahrenheit tonight in Barcelona, where gas-powered patio heaters are officially banned due to their carbon emissions.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Electric pickups used in deadly New Year’s Day attacks

Authorities are investigating whether yesterday’s deadly truck attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas may be linked. Both incidents involved electric pickups. In New Orleans, a man drove a Ford F-150 Lightning into a crowd in the French Quarter, killing 15 people and injuring dozens of others. In Vegas, a Tesla Cybertruck packed with explosives detonated outside the Trump International Hotel, killing the driver and injuring seven others. Both vehicles were rented through a budget app called Turo. Electric vehicles tend to be heavier than their internal combustion counterparts, mostly due to their battery packs. This can make them particularly deadly in collisions with smaller vehicles and, of course, pedestrians. Ford’s 2024 F-150 Lightning has a curb weight ranging from 6,000 to nearly 7,000 pounds; the Cybertruck starts at 6,600 pounds, about 2,000 pounds heavier than the average new vehicle weight.

In the Las Vegas explosion, Sheriff Kevin McMahill indicated the Cybertruck actually “limited the damage that occurred.” The vehicle’s exterior appeared to remain intact. In a post on X, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said: “The evil knuckleheads picked the wrong vehicle for a terrorist attack.”

2. Hydrogen tax credit guidance expected this week

The Biden administration plans to release guidance for hydrogen production tax credits this week, likely on Friday, two sources told Reuters. The guidance will “provide a pathway” for tax credits for hydrogen producers that use nuclear power, the outlet reported. Back in October, Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo told Heatmap the rules would be out by the end of 2024. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained, the Treasury Department’s must decide how hydrogen producers who use electrolysis — sending electricity through water to split its molecules — should deal with the indirect carbon emissions associated with drawing power from the grid. “Finalizing rules that will help scale the clean hydrogen industry while implementing the environmental safeguards established in the law remains a top priority for Treasury,” spokesperson Michael Martinez told Reuters. “In that process, we are carefully considering the numerous comments we have received on the proposed regulations.” In his conversation with Heatmap, Adeyemo acknowledged that the final rules were unlikely to please everyone.

3. A brief look back at 2024 extreme weather...

Climate change meant that there were about 41 more “extreme heat” days in 2024, according to the World Weather Attribution’s annual extreme weather report. Climate change contributed to at least 3,700 deaths, but “it’s likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change [in 2024] is in the tens, or hundreds of thousands,” the group said. While the El Niño weather pattern contributed to global trends, climate change played a bigger role in fueling extreme weather. “As the planet warms, the influence of climate change increasingly overrides other natural phenomena affecting the weather,” the report added.

World Weather Attribution

China’s weather agency also reported that 2024 was the country’s warmest year on record, and that “the top four warmest years ever were the past four years, with all top 10 warmest years since 1961 occurring in the 21st century.” And a report from the National Institute for Space Research concluded that Brazil’s Amazon rainforest experienced 140,328 fires last year, the highest number in 17 years. In a New Year’s message, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said we are in an era of real-time climate breakdown.

4. ...And an early forecast for 2025

The UK’s Met Office projected that global temperatures will remain high in 2025 despite the shift to La Niña, averaging between 2.3 and 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial average. “Years such as 2025, which aren’t dominated by the warming influence of El Niño, should be cooler,” said Professor Adam Scaife, who leads the team behind the Met Office’s global forecast. “2016 was an El Niño year and at the time it was the warmest year on record for global temperature. In comparison to our forecast for 2025 though, 2016 is now looking decidedly cool.”

Met Office

5. New York enacts new climate law to fine fossil fuel companies

In case you missed it: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a new bill into law that allows the state to fine fossil fuel companies for climate damages. The law could see the companies incur charges of up to $75 billion over the next 25 years – though many are expected to file legal challenges. Firms will be fined based on their emissions between 2000 and 2018. The money will go into a Climate Superfund and be put toward mitigation and adaptation measures. Vermont implemented a similar law last summer. “New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world: The companies most responsible for the climate crisis will be held accountable,” New York Sen. Liz Krueger said in a statement.

THE KICKER

“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” The late President Jimmy Carter, upon installing solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House in 1979. Ronald Reagan had the panels removed seven years later. Carter died on Sunday at the age of 100.

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AM Briefing

Trump’s Reactor Realism

On the solar siege, New York’s climate law, and radioactive data center

Trump Makes Headway on Plan to Build 10 New Large Reactors
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rain storm set to dump 2 inches of rain across Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas will quench drought-parched woodlands, tempering mounting wildfire risk • The soil on New Zealand’s North Island is facing what the national forecast called a “significant moisture deficit” after a prolonged drought • Temperatures in Odessa, Texas, are as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than average.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump’s plan to build 10 new large reactors is making headway

For all its willingness to share in the hype around as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors and microreactors, the Trump administration has long endorsed what I like to call reactor realism. By that, I mean it embraces the need to keep building more of the same kind of large-scale pressurized water reactors we know how to construct and operate while supporting the development and deployment of new technologies. In his flurry of executive orders on nuclear power last May, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Energy to “prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate” 5 gigawatts of power uprates to existing reactors “and have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.” The record $26 billion loan the agency’s in-house lender — the Loan Programs Office, recently renamed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing — gave to Southern Company this week to cover uprates will fulfill the first part of the order. Now the second part is getting real. In a scoop on Thursday, Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported that the Energy Department has started taking meetings with utilities and developers of what he said “would almost certainly be AP1000s, a third-generation reactor produced by Westinghouse capable of producing up to 1.1 gigawatts of electricity per unit.”

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Podcast

The Peril of Talking About Electricity Affordability

Rob sits down with Jane Flegal, an expert on all things emissions policy, to dissect the new electricity price agenda.

Power lines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As electricity affordability has risen in the public consciousness, so too has it gone up the priority list for climate groups — although many of their proposals are merely repackaged talking points from past political cycles. But are there risks of talking about affordability so much, and could it distract us from the real issues with the power system?

Rob is joined by Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute and the States Forum. Flegal was the former senior director for industrial emissions at the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, and she has worked on climate policy at Stripe. She was recently executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation.

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Power lines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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