Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

Biden Sends a Climate Warning in Farewell Address

On the president’s last speech, the Climate Corps, and disappearing cloud cover

Biden Sends a Climate Warning in Farewell Address
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Cooler temperatures and calmer winds are helping firefighters make progress against ongoing blazes in Los Angeles • Argentina is bracing for an extreme heat wave • A blast of Arctic air called a “Siberian express” will send temperatures plummeting across central and eastern states this weekend.

THE TOP FIVE

1. New analysis links climate change to LA fires

A new scientific analysis out of the University of California, Los Angeles, concludes that climate change intensified the city’s devastating wildfires. The UCLA researchers estimated that intense heat caused by climate change may be linked to about 25% of the fuel that fed the fires. “We believe that the fires would still have been extreme without the climate change components,” the authors wrote, “but would have been somewhat smaller and less intense.” This analysis is not peer reviewed, and the scientists call for further research. But they add that future wildfire mitigation should focus on “factors we can control,” like stopping people from lighting fires, making homes fire-resistant, and thinking more carefully about where we build.

2. Biden warns that ‘powerful forces’ want to reverse climate progress

President Biden gave a televised farewell speech yesterday from the Oval Office, in which he said that “the existential threat of climate change has never been clearer,” pointing to recent natural disasters like flooding in North Carolina and wildfires in California. He touted his Inflation Reduction Act as “the most significant climate and clean energy law ever, ever in the history of the world,” and said we don’t have to choose between planet and prosperity. But Biden had a warning. Without naming names, he said that “powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis to serve their own interests for power and profit.” He added: “We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future.”

This morning a handful of Democratic House Representatives will host a press conference in which they urge their colleagues in Congress to oppose “efforts to roll back policies helping to build a clean energy economy, lower costs, protect public health, and cut climate pollution.”

3. Climate Corps to shut down

The Biden administration has been “quietly winding down” the Climate Corps green jobs program before President-elect Trump takes office, according toGrist. “The people who were responsible for coordinating it have left office or are leaving office,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University who has been researching climate service projects for AmeriCorps. “Before they go, they are shutting it all down.” But the good news is that because the roles created through the program were scattered across a diverse mix of local and state governments and nonprofits, as well as federal agencies, many of them already have funding locked in and will therefore be able to stick around for a few years. “The jobs survive, even if the branding doesn’t,” wrote Kate Yoder at Grist.

4. Takeaways from DOE nominee Chris Wright’s confirmation hearing

Yesterday’s confirmation hearing for Chris Wright, a fracking executive and Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, proved to be relatively low-key and collegial. Wright repeatedly avowed that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons, although he demurred that it was a “global” problem and turned his responses repeatedly to energy innovation and developing energy resources in the United States. He lamented that fossil fuels had “fallen out of fashion and out of favor,” but also expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal and nuclear power. “Wright’s relatively easy reception reflects the fact that there actually are wide areas of bipartisan agreement on the kind of energy research and technology development work the Department of Energy does,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.

Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, also had his confirmation hearing yesterday. He said that drivers of electric vehicles should have to pay to use roads because they don’t pay taxes on fuel.

Other nominees, including Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior and Lee Zeldin for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, may endure more contentious hearings today.

5. Shrinking cloud cover may have a cooling effect

Warmer temperatures caused by climate change are reducing low-cloud cover in some parts of the world, and ironically, this may be helping to keep Earth a little bit cooler, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Researchers from McGill University measured the heat energy that Earth reflects into the atmosphere, and noticed that lower cloud cover means more of his heat energy gets released. “Without these cloud changes, the surface would warm even faster,” said Lei Liu, a graduate student in McGill’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and an author on the study. “This work offers observational truth about how clouds affect warming, which can be used to improve climate models and guide environmental policies.” Of course, clouds also help reflect heat before it even reaches Earth’s surface, and a separate piece of research published last month suggested that the decreasing cloud cover is actually making global warming worse. In other words, it’s complicated.

THE KICKER

Natural disasters have been linked to rent hikes between 4% and 6% in affected cities, and in many cases, these elevated prices never fully come down.

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

Tariffs Will Flatten the U.S. Bicycle Industry

Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.

An e-bike and money.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.

Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Economy

Tariffs Are Making Gas Cheaper — But Not Cheap Enough

Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.

A gas station.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.

But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Electric Vehicles

There Has Never Been a Better Time for EV Battery Swapping

With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.

A battery with wheels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.

That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.

Keep reading...Show less
Green