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Current conditions: Extreme storm warnings are in place across Europe • Large hail could terrorize the High Plains today and tomorrow • It will feel like 113 degrees Fahrenheit in Houston, Texas.
THE TOP FIVE
1. A quick climate roundup from the DNC
It’s Day 3 of the Democratic National Convention. The Obamas took center stage last night. Now the focus shifts to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who will accept the vice-presidential nomination this evening. There are a few climate-specific events on the schedule today, including a meeting hosted by major environmental groups (some of which are behind a new $55 million climate ad push for Kamala Harris) to “present the latest on climate,” and a meeting of the Council on the Environment & Climate Crisis. Today’s events will also feature speeches from climate advocates Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).
2. Climate change threatens U.S. medical blood supply
The American Red Cross says that extreme weather events are pushing down attendance at its blood drives. In July alone, the organization experienced a shortfall of 19,000 donations and its blood inventory dropped by a quarter, in part because of heat waves. And so far in August, 60 blood drives have been canceled because of extreme weather. “That limits our ability to meet hospital requests for blood,” Rodney Wilson, the senior biomedical communications specialist for the American Red Cross, toldThe Guardian. “So as hospitals request blood to treat patients, we’ve had to limit our distributions of some of those key types that they need the most, because there isn’t enough for everybody.” The American Red Cross supplies 40% of the country’s donated blood.
3. NextDecade cancels carbon capture and storage plans for Texas LNG facility
Liquefied natural gas company NextDecade yesterday canceled its plans to build a carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility on its $18.4 billion Rio Grande LNG export project in Texas, officially withdrawing its application from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The company had big plans for the Rio Grande facility, which will be one of the largest LNG facilities in the country once completed. It was touted as the first U.S. LNG project expected to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 90% through CCS. FERC approved the export project, but a few weeks ago the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out that approval citing serious “procedural defects.” The court said FERC hadn’t sufficiently examined the project’s environmental impact. According to Gas Outlook, the Rio Grande facility will emit more than 8 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent every year and be “the largest polluter in the Rio Grande Valley.”
4. Rivian VP of manufacturing departs
Rivian this week got approval to expand its plant in the city of Normal, Illinois, to build its upcoming R2 crossover SUV, Electrekreported. The R2 is expected to enter production in 2026, but the company needs to continue to expand its Normal operations first. The town council approved a whole new “R2” building and more square footage overall. In other Rivian news, the company’s vice president of manufacturing, Tim Fallon, is leaving to join Stellantis. Fallon is the latest in a wave of recent high-level departures for the company. “The exits highlight the volatility at the EV startup as it navigates production hurdles and a broader slowdown in demand for plug-in vehicles also afflicting its rivals,” explainedBloomberg.
5. China’s approvals for new coal power plants plummet
New analysis from Greenpeace East Asia finds that China cut approvals for new coal power operations by 80% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period last year, “marking a potential turning point in China’s energy transition, as wind and solar power capacity continues to expand.” However, while many fewer projects have been given the green light, those that have are quite large. China is the world’s top emitter of coal carbon emissions.
Greenpeace
THE KICKER
Virtually the entire population of the United States has received at least one extreme weather alert since the beginning of May.
Current conditions: Multiple wildfires are raging on Oklahoma’s panhandle border with Texas • New York City and its suburbs are under a weather advisory over dense fog this morning • Ahmedabad, the largest city in the northwest Indian state of Gujarat, is facing temperatures as much as 4 degrees Celsius higher than historical averages this week.
THE TOP FIVE
1. New bipartisan bill aims to clear nuclear’s biggest remaining bottleneck
The United States could still withdraw from the International Energy Agency if the Paris-based watchdog, considered one of the leading sources of global data and forecasts on energy demand, continues to promote and plan for “ridiculous” net-zero scenarios by 2050. That’s what Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said on stage Tuesday at a conference in the French capital. Noting that the IEA was founded in the wake of the oil embargoes that accompanied the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Trump administration wants the organization to refocus on issues of energy security and poverty, Wright said. He cited a recent effort to promote clean cooking fuels for the 2 billion people who still lack regular access to energy — more than 2 million of whom are estimated to die each year from exposure to fumes from igniting wood, crop residue, or dung indoors — as evidence that the IEA was shifting in Washington’s direction. But, Wright said, “We’re definitely not satisfied. We’re not there yet.” Wright described decarbonization policies as “politicians’ dreams about greater control” through driving “up the price of energy so high that the demand for energy” plummets. “To me, that’s inhuman,” Wright said. “It’s immoral. It’s totally unrealistic. It’s not going to happen. And if so much of the data reporting agencies are on these sort of left-wing big government fantasies, that just distorts” the IEA’s mission.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright.Jesus Vargas/Getty Images
Wright didn’t, however, just come to Paris to chastise the Europeans. Prompted by a remark from Jean-Luc Palayer, the top U.S. executive of French uranium giant Orano, Wright called the company “fantastic” and praised plans to build new enrichment facilities and bring waste reprocessing to America. While the French, Russians, and Japanese have long recycled spent nuclear waste into fresh fuel, the U.S. briefly but “foolishly” banned commercial reprocessing in the 1970s, Wright said, and never got an industry going again. As a result, all the spent fuel from the past seven decades of nuclear energy production is sitting on site in swimming pools or dry cask storage. “We want to have a nuclear renaissance. We have got to get serious about this stuff. So we will start reprocessing, likely in partnership with Orano,” Wright said. Designating Yucca Mountain as the first U.S. permanent repository for nuclear waste set the project in Nevada up for failure in the early 2000s, Wright added. “In the United States, we’ve tried to find a permanent repository for waste and we’ve had, I think, the wrong approach,” he noted. The Trump administration, he said, was “doing it differently” by inviting states to submit proposals for federally backed campuses to host nuclear enrichment and waste reprocessing facilities. Still, reprocessing leaves behind a small amount of waste that needs to be buried, so, Wright said, “we’re going to develop multiple long-term repositories.”
2. Trump could ease tariffs on metals, U.S. trade rep says
The Trump administration could tweak tariffs on metals and other materials, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Tuesday. During an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Greer said he’d heard from companies who claimed they needed to hire more workers to navigate the tariffs. “You may want to sometimes adjust the way some of the tariffs are for compliance purposes,” he said. “We’re not trying to have people deal with so much beancounting that they’re not running their company correctly.” Still, he said, the U.S. is “shipping more steel than ever,” and has, as I reported in a newsletter last month, the first new aluminum smelter in the works in half a century. “So clearly those [tariffs] are going in the right direction and they’re going to stay in place.”
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3. Gavin Newsom signs a clean energy pact with the UK
California Governor Gavin Newsom, widely seen as a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nod in two years, is already staking out an alternative energy approach to Trump. During a stop in London on his tour of Europe, Newsom this week signed onto a new pact with British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, pledging to work together with the United Kingdom on deploying more clean energy technologies such as offshore wind in the nation’s most populous state. One of the biggest winners of the deal, according to Politico, is Octopus Energy, the biggest British energy supplier, which is looking to enter the California market. But the agreement also sets the stage for more joint atmospheric research between California and the U.K. “California is the best place in America to invest in a clean economy because we set clear goals and we deliver,” Newsom said. “Today, we deepened our partnership with the United Kingdom on climate action and welcomed nearly a billion dollars in clean tech investment from Octopus Energy.”
France, meanwhile, is realigning its energy plan for the next nine years in a way the Trump administration will like. The draft version of the plan released last year called for 90 gigawatts of installed solar capacity by 2035. But the latest plan published last week reduced the target to a range of 55 to 80 gigawatts. Onshore wind falls to 35 to 40 gigawatts from 40 to 45 gigawatts. Offshore wind drops to 15 gigawatts from 18 gigawatts. Instead, Renewables Now reported, the country is betting on a nuclear revival.
4. Georgia’s utility regulator could lose its Republican majority
When Democrats unseated two Republicans on Georgia’s five-member Public Service Commission, the upsets signaled a change to the state’s utility regulator so big one expert described it to Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo at the time as “seismic.” Now one of the three remaining Republicans on the body is stepping aside in this year’s election. In a lengthy post on X, Tricia Pridemore said she would end her eight-year tenure on the commission by opting out of reelection. “I have consistently championed common-sense, America First policies that prioritize energy independence, grid reliability, and practical solutions over partisan rhetoric,” wrote Pridemore, who both championed the nuclear expansion at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle and pushed for more natural gas generation. “These efforts have laid the foundation for job creation, national security, and opportunity across our state. By emphasizing results over rhetoric, we have positioned Georgia as a leader in affordability, reliability, and forward-thinking energy planning.”
5. World’s biggest miner books a profit from pivoting to copper
BHP, the world’s most valuable mining company, reported a nearly 30% spike in net profits for the first half of this year thanks to soaring demand for copper. The Australian giant’s chief executive, Mike Henry, said the earnings marked a “milestone” as copper contributed the largest share of its profit for the first time, accounting for 51% of income before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization. The company also signed a $4.3 billion deal with Canada’s Wheaton Precious Metals to supply silver from its Antamina mine in Peru in a deal the Financial Times called “the largest of its kind for so-called precious metals streaming, where miners make deals to sell gold or silver that is a byproduct of their main business.”
The mining companies the Trump administration is investing in, on the other hand, may have less rosy news for the market. Back in October, I told you that the U.S. was taking a stake in Trilogy Metals after approving its request to build a mining road in a remote corner of Alaska that’s largely untouched by industry. On Tuesday, the company reported a net loss of $42 million. The loss largely stemmed from what Mining.comcalled “the treatment of the proposed U.S. government’s investment as a derivative financial instrument” under standard American accounting rules. The accounting impact, however, had no effect on the cash the company had on hand and “is expected to resolve once applicable conditions are met.”
THE KICKER
“It’s an environmental catastrophe.” That’s how Brett Davis, the head of a nonprofit that advocates for less pollution at Mardi Gras, referred to the waste the carnival generates each year in New Orleans. Data the city’s sanitation department gave The New York Times showed that the weekslong party produced an average of 1,123 tons of waste per year for the last decade. Reusing the plastic beads that became popular in the 1970s when manufacturing moved overseas and made cheap goods widely accessible just amounts to “recirculating toxic plastic junk no one wants,” Davis told the newspaper. Instead, he’s sold more than $1 million in more sustainable alternative items to throw during the parade, including jambalaya mix, native flower start kits, and plant-based glitter.
Batteries are the bugaboo. We know that. Electric cars are, at some level, just giant batteries on wheels, and building those big units cheaply enough is the key to making EVs truly cost-competitive with fossil fuel-burning trucks and cars and SUVs.
But that isn’t the end of the story. As automakers struggle to lower the cost to build their vehicles amid a turbulent time for EVs in America, they’re looking for any way to shave off a little expense. The target of late? Plain old wires.
Last month, when General Motors had to brace its investors for billions in losses related to curtailing its EV efforts and shifting factories back to combustion, it outlined cost-saving measures meant to get things moving in the right direction. While much of the focus was on using battery chemistries like lithium ion phosphate, otherwise known as LFP, that are cheaper to build, CEO Mary Barra noted that the engineers on every one of the company’s EVs were working “to take out costs beyond the battery,” of which cutting wiring will be a part.
They are not alone in this obsession. Coming into a do-or-die year with the arrival of the R2 SUV, Rivian said it had figured out how to cut two miles of wires out of the design, a coup that also cuts 44 pounds from the vehicle’s weight (this is still a 5,000-pound EV, but every bit counts). Ford has become obsessed with figuring out smarter and cheaper ways for its money-hemorrhaging EV division to build cars; the company admitted, after tearing down a Tesla Model 3 to look inside, that its Mustang Mach-E EV had a mile of extra and possibly unnecessary wiring compared to its rival.
A bunch of wires sounds like an awfully mundane concern for cars so sophisticated. But while every foot adds cost and weight, the obsession with stripping out wiring is about something deeper — the broad move to redefine how cars are designed and built.
It so happens that the age of the electric vehicle is also the age of the software-defined car. Although automobiles were born as purely mechanical devices, code has been creeping in for decades, and software is needed to manage the computerized fuel injection systems and on-board diagnostic systems that explain why your Check Engine light is illuminated. Tesla took this idea to extremes when it routed the driver’s entire user interface through a giant central touchscreen. This was the car built like a phone, enabling software updates and new features to be rolled out years after someone bought the car.
As Tesla ruled the EV industry in the 2010s, the smartphone-on-wheels philosophy spread. But it requires a lot of computing infrastructure to run a car on software, which adds complexity and weight. That’s why carmakers have spent so much time in the past couple of years talking about wires. Their challenge (among many) is to simplify an EV’s production without sacrificing any of its capability.
Consider what Rivian is attempting to do with the R2. As InsideEVsexplains, electric cars have exploded in their need for electronic control units, the embedded computing brains that control various systems. Some models now need more than 100 to manage all the software-defined components. Rivian managed to sink the number to just seven, and thus shave even more cost off the R2, through a “zonal” scheme where the ECUs control all the systems located in their particular region of the vehicle.
Compared to an older, centralized system that connects all the components via long wires, the savings are remarkable. As Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe posted on X: “The R2 harness improves massively over the R1 Gen 2 harness. Building on the backbone of our network architecture and zonal ECUs, we focused on ease of install in the plant and overall simplification through integrated design — less wires, less clips and far fewer splices!”
Legacy automakers, meanwhile, are racing to catch up. Even those that have built decent-selling quality EVs to date have not come close to matching the software sophistication of Tesla and Rivian. But they have begun to see the light — not just about fancy iPads in the cockpit, but also about how the software-defined vehicle can help them to run their factories in a simpler and cheaper way.
How those companies approach the software-defined car will define them in the years to come. By 2028, GM hopes to have finished its next-gen software platform that “will unite every major system from propulsion to infotainment and safety on a single, high-speed compute core,” according to Barra. The hope is that this approach not only cuts down on wiring and simplifies manufacturing, but also makes Chevys and Cadillacs more easily updatable and better-equipped for the self-driving future.
In that sense, it’s not about the wires. It’s about all the trends that have come to dominate electric vehicles — affordability, functionality, and autonomy — colliding head-on.
February 2015 was the snowiest month in Boston’s history. Over 28 days, the city received a debilitating 64.8 inches of snow; plows ran around the clock, eventually covering a distance equivalent to “almost 12 trips around the Equator.” Much of that plowed snow ended up in the city’s Seaport District, piled into a massive 75-foot-tall mountain that didn’t melt until July.
The Seaport District slush pile was one of 11 such “snow farms” established around Boston that winter, a cutesy term for a place that is essentially a dumpsite for snow plows. But though Bostonians reviled the pile — “Our nightmare is finally over!” the Massachusetts governor tweeted once it melted, an event that occasioned multiple headlines — the science behind snow farming might be the key to the continuation of the Winter Olympics in a warming world.
The number of cities capable of hosting the Winter Games is shrinking due to climate change. Of 93 currently viable host locations, only 52 will still have reliable winter conditions by the 2050s, researchers found back in 2024. In fact, over the 70 years since Cortina d’Ampezzo first hosted the Olympic Games in 1956, February temperatures in the Dolomites have warmed by 6.4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit climate research and communications group. Italian organizers are expected to produce more than 3 million cubic yards of artificial snow this year to make up for Mother Nature’s shortfall.
But just a few miles down the road from Bormio — the Olympic venue for the men’s Alpine skiing events as well as the debut of ski mountaineering next week — is the satellite venue of Santa Caterina di Valfurva, which hasn’t struggled nearly as much this year when it comes to usable snow. That’s because it is one of several European ski areas that have begun using snow farming to their advantage.
Like Ruka in Finland and Saas-Fee in Switzerland, Santa Caterina plows its snow each spring into what is essentially a more intentional version of the Great Boston Snow Pile. Using patented tarps and siding created by a Finnish company called Snow Secure, the facilities cover the snow … and then wait. As spring turns to summer, the pile shrinks, not because it’s melting but because it’s becoming denser, reducing the air between the individual snowflakes. In combination with the pile’s reduced surface area, this makes the snow cold and insulated enough that not even a sunny day will cause significant melt-off. (Neil DeGrasse Tyson once likened the phenomenon to trying to cook an entire potato with a lighter; successfully raising the inner temperature of a dense snowball, much less a gigantic snow pile, requires more heat.)
Shockingly little snow melts during storage. Snow Secure reports a melt rate of 8% to 20% on piles that can be 50,000 cubic meters in size, or the equivalent of about 20 Olympic swimming pools. When autumn eventually returns, ski areas can uncover their piles of farmed snow and spread it across a desired slope or trail using snowcats, specialized groomers that break up and evenly distribute the surface. For Santa Caterina, the goal was to store enough to make a nearly 2-mile-long cross-country trail — no need to wait for the first significant snowfall of the season, which creeps later and later every year.
“In many places, November used to be more like a winter month,” Antti Lauslahti, the CEO of Snow Secure, told me. “Now it’s more like a late-autumn month; it’s quite warm and unpredictable. Having that extra few weeks is significant. When you cannot open by Thanksgiving or Christmas, you can lose 20% to 30% of the annual turnover.”
Though the concept of snow farming is not new — Lauslahti told me the idea stems from the Finnish tradition of storing snow over the summer beneath wood chips, once a cheap byproduct of the local logging industry — the company's polystyrene mat technology, which helps to reduce summer melt, is. Now that the technique is patented, Snow Secure has begun expanding into North America with a small team. The venture could prove lucrative: Researchers expect that by the end of the century, as many as 80% of the downhill ski areas in the U.S. will be forced to wait until after Christmas to open, potentially resulting in economic losses of up to $2 billion.
While there have been a few early adopters of snow farming in Wisconsin, Utah, and Idaho, the number of ski areas in the United States using the technique remains surprisingly low, especially given its many other upsides. In the States, the most common snow management system is the creation of artificial snow, which is typically water- and energy-intensive. Snow farming not only avoids those costs — which can also have large environmental tolls, particularly in the water-strapped West — but the super-dense snow farming produces is “really ideal” for something like the Race Centre at Canada’s Sun Peaks Resort, where top athletes train. Downhill racers “want that packed, harder, faster snow,” Christina Antoniak, the area’s director of brand and communications, told me of the success of the inaugural season of snow farming at Sun Peaks. “That’s exactly what stored snow produced for that facility.”
The returns are greatest for small ski areas, which are also the most vulnerable to climate change. While the technology is an investment — Antoniak ballparked that Sun Peaks spent around $185,000 on Snow Secure’s siding — the money goes further at a smaller park. At somewhere like Park City Mountain in Utah, stored snow would cover only a small portion of the area’s 140 miles of skiable routes. But it can make a major difference for an area down the road like the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center, which has a more modest 20 miles of cross-country trails.
In fact, the 2025-2026 winter season will be the Nordic Center’s first using Snow Secure’s technology. Luke Bodensteiner, the area’s general manager and chief of sport, told me that alpine ski areas are “all very curious to see how our project goes. There is a lot of attention on what we do, and if it works out satisfactorily, we might see them move into it.”
Ensuring a reliable start to the ski season is no small thing for a local economy; jobs and travel plans rely on an area being open when it says it will be. But for the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center, the stakes are even higher: The area is one of the planned host venues of the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Games. “Based on historical weather patterns, our goal is to be able to make all the snow that we need for the entire Olympic trail system in two weeks,” Bodensteiner said, adding, “We envision having four or five of these snow piles around the venue in the summer before the Olympic Games, just to guarantee — in a worst case scenario — that we’ve got snow on the venue.”
Antoniak, at Canada’s Sun Peaks, also told me that their area has been a bit of a “guinea pig” when it comes to snow farming. “A lot of ski areas have had their eyes on Sun Peaks and how [snow farming is] working here,” she told me. “And we’re happy to have those conversations with them, because this is something that gives the entire industry some more resiliency.”
Of course, the physics behind snow farming has a downside, too. The same science saving winter sports is also why that giant, dirty pile of plowed snow outside your building isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Greenpeace
Energy Secretary Chris Wright.Jesus Vargas/Getty Images
