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Climate

The Rich Get Richer Off of Climate Aid

On climate finance, shifting solar landscapes, and marine pollution.

The Rich Get Richer Off of Climate Aid
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Strong thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hail on Tuesday killed multiple people and knocked out power across the Midwest • Heavy rain is exacerbating ongoing flooding in southern Brazil • Miami is having its hottest May on record.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Rich countries are enriching themselves with climate aid

The world’s developed countries have pledged to spend $100 billion per year helping developing nations grapple with the effects of climate change, but many of them are channeling economic benefits back to themselves, according to a new report from Reuters. France, Japan, and Germany — the three countries that reported issuing the most climate financial aid between 2015 and 2020 — each gave more in the form of loans than they did grants, saddling already debt-burdened nations with yet more interest payments. Other aid agreements required recipients to purchase materials or employ organizations from the donor country’s own suppliers.

“The benefits to donor countries disproportionately overshadow the primary objective of supporting climate action in developing countries,” Ritu Bharadwaj, principal researcher on climate governance and finance at the International Institute for Environment and Development, told Reuters.

2. Solar-plus-storage projects gain ground in the West

Solar projects that are co-located with storage are dominating Western interconnection queues, according to an energy research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. More than 98% of proposed solar capacity within the territory of the California Independent System Operator and about 87% of proposed solar capacity in the rest of the West is paired with storage, or, in some instances, with wind, S&P’s Adam Wilson said. Only about one-fourth of the West’s existing solar capacity is co-located with storage. Hybrid solar projects have “yet to gain firm foothold,” Wilson told Utility Dive, but recent data “suggest that tide may be turning.”

3. ICYMI: The world will be renewable-powered, even without more government help

We’re almost halfway through the decade that will make or break our climate future. To get to net-zero by 2050, we’re going to have to spend a lot more money a lot more quickly.

These are among the main conclusions of BloombergNEF’s 2024 New Energy Outlook, which determined that emissions will have to peak and renewable capacity will have to triple this decade for the world to hit net-zero by midcentury. Decarbonizing the global energy system within that time frame could cost $215 trillion, the report found — 19% more than the cost of an economics-driven transition that would miss the Paris Agreement goals and result in 2.6 degrees Celsius of warming. Even in that economics-driven scenario, which assumes no new climate policies other than the ones we’ve already got, renewable sources power 70% of global energy needs by 2050. The conclusions illustrate both the momentum behind the clean energy transition and the urgent need for stronger government support.

Charts of future renewables use.BloombergNEF

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  • 4. Coal fraud pollutes the air in India

    The Adani Group, a multinational commodities trading conglomerate with close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, allegedly bought cheap, highly polluting coal and passed it off as expensive, low-polluting coal, achieving a fat profit and worsening air quality in the process, according to reporting from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project published in the Financial Times. Invoices from 2014 appear to show nearly two-dozen instances of the group buying low-grade coal from one company and selling it to another with which it had a contract to supply high-efficiency coal — 1.5 million metric tons in total. Adani Group denied the allegations, and other companies involved in the transactions did not respond to FT’s request for comment.

    The report comes in the midst of nationwide voting in India, which began in April and will end next week. Modi is running for a third term, but questions about his relationship with the powerful Adani family have dogged his campaign. Meanwhile, air pollution kills millions in India each year.

    5. International tribunal declares greenhouse gases a marine pollutant

    In a win for island nations threatened by rising seas, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea said in an advisory opinion Tuesday that greenhouse gases count as marine pollution, making countries responsible for limiting the impacts of their emissions. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the tribunal found, countries are required to “take all necessary measures to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from ‘any source.’” This includes greenhouse gases that are absorbed by the ocean, according to the tribunal. The opinion is the tribunal’s first climate-related judgment and, while not legally binding, could set a precedent that shapes decisions in courts around the world.

    THE KICKER

    Drought in Mexico is worsening the strain already felt by some species of endangered axolotl, an aquatic salamander with an unusual life cycle.

    An axolotlIva Dimova/Getty Images

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    Economy

    AM Briefing: Liberation Day

    On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

    Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

    THE TOP FIVE

    1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

    President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

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    Podcast

    The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

    Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

    Lee Zeldin.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

    It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

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    Adaptation

    Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

    That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

    A barn.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

    Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

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    Green