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On the first night of climate week, I headed over to a happy hour hosted by a bunch of progressive climate advocacy nonprofits, including Climate Cabinet, Data for Progress, and Evergreen Collaborative. The event was called “Progress No Matter What,” and the theme was states’ ability to advance climate action regardless of national politics.
On the packed back patio of a beer garden on the Lower East Side, a handful of speakers took turns climbing atop a picnic bench to address the boisterous crowd. State and federal officials celebrated the billions of dollars flowing to states to decarbonize and pressed attendees not to ignore the down-ballot climate champions running for office in November. Then, to close things out, White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi got up. Over the past year, I’ve heard Zaidi deliver the same impassioned but rehearsed preamble on press call after press call reminding us of President Biden’s climate accomplishments during his term. But here, Zaidi let loose. He said the Wall Street Journal had published a story that morning that started with the line “Climate optimism is fading.” He didn’t think so. “This is popular shit!” he declared, of efforts to fight climate change while reducing pollution, and the audience erupted in cheers. — Emily Pontecorvo
Last weekend, I attended the U.S. premiere of The Here Now Project at the inaugural Climate Film Festival — and was totally wowed. The 75-minute documentary is unnarrated and composed entirely of archival cell phone videos, vlogs, and news clips that were shot during climate disasters in 2021, ranging from the Texas power crisis that left almost 250 people dead after a February cold snap to the “sea snot” that covered Turkey’s Sea of Marmara over that summer.
While it’s harrowing to see all the footage back-to-back — and to learn about disasters I hadn’t paid close attention to at the time, like the subway flooding in Zhengzhou or the dust storms in Brazil — I was even more struck by the seemingly universal urge people have to document the way extreme weather upends their lives, even when those lives are quite immediately at risk.
The movie’s power lies in echoes and patterns of human nature, from our curiosity to our horror to our powerful compassion and self-sacrifice. I spoke to the filmmakers, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel, for my article about the Climate Film Festival last week, and Jacobs told me they hope to make The Here Now Project an ongoing chronicle of climate change in the style of Michael Apted’s famous Up series; I very much hope they will succeed. — Jeva Lange
At several events this week related to carbon dioxide removal, the conversation turned again and again to the challenge of finance and the scarcity of buyers. During a marine carbon removal panel on Monday, for instance, James Lindsay, the director of investments at the philanthropic Builders Initiative described the tension between simultaneously trying to raise capital for a given carbon removal approach while also trying to prove that it’s safe and actually works. While there are a few buyers, like the Frontier Climate initiative, that accept these conditions and are willing to support nascent approaches that may or may not work out, making one big deal with Frontier doesn’t provide the consistent cash flow that a startup needs to progress, he said.
Later that day, at a mini-conference hosted by the direct air capture company Climeworks, CEO Christoph Gebald declared that the industry simply cannot rely on voluntary purchases if it is going to scale. “We need to transition to regulated markets,” he said. Josh Becker, a California State Senator gave a brief presentation on a bill he introduced this year, SB 308, to do just that. It was a “government-enabled, market led” policy that would have required corporate polluters to begin paying for carbon removal. The bill “died a mysterious death,” he said, but he plans to try again in 2025.
The event closed out with a panel on “the economic opportunity of carbon removal in the U.S.,” and yet the talk once again turned to the economic obstacles. “Demand is an existential challenge,” Giana Amador, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, said. “If we want deployment beyond these 1,000- to 10,000-ton facilities, we need a demand signal that is robust, steady, resilient, growing, in order to make sure these companies can raise the private and public sector funding they need.” — Emily
While most of the energy developers, technologists, and investors I spoke to and/or heard speak this week were excited about artificial intelligence as a way to bring forward demand for clean electrons, there was one interesting note of caution from Katie Rae, chief executive of Engine Ventures, the investment firm that has backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the long-duration battery company Form Energy. “The government has to think about it: Are the people going to get energy? Or are the hyperscalers going to get energy? The pitchforks can come.” — Matthew Zeitlin
On Tuesday morning, I stopped by “Geothermal House,” a day-long event and installation at the Hall des Lumières near City Hall. It’s a former bank building that now hosts “immersive experiences,” which essentially amount to wandering around a room decorated with floor to ceiling projections of art, like the paintings of Chagall. This time, however, the room was made up to bring you miles deep within the Earth’s crust.
The VR lounge at Geothermal House.Emily Pontecorvo
The event was put on by Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit dedicated to transferring skills and knowledge from the oil and gas industry to scale geothermal energy. “This is the first time geothermal has shown up at NY Climate Week,” the group’s executive director, Jamie Beard, declared at the start of a series of panels held in the central hall. Unfortunately, the talks were nearly impossible to hear in the cavernous marble room, but I spent some time wandering around, watching the animated projections of geothermal power plants and hit up the “VR lounge,” which offered a much more convincing immersive experience and taught me about the difference between “enhanced” and “advanced” geothermal.
The event also had some of the best swag I saw at Climate Week, including a station where you could 3D print your face onto “the core of the Earth.” Jeva was accurate when she compared the resulting object to a Ferrero Rocher. — Emily
Two members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation — which is considered to be one of the first communities in the U.S. to be displaced by climate change — spoke at an event on Wednesday hosted by EarthRights International. They emphasized the way the state of Louisiana failed to keep the tribe intact during the relocation effort, with Chief Deme Naquin and Tribal Secretary Chantel Comardelle explaining that while their own story is one marked by failure, they hope other communities will be able to learn from it. After all, it’s not just a house or neighborhood that you lose to something like coastal erosion; it’s also the stories and memories of the place you’d called home. “We probably weren’t the first” community to be displaced by climate change, Chief Deme told the room, “but we’re definitely not the last.” — Jeva
And over in D.C., during “National Clean Energy Week,” a more industry-focused panel-ganza, the cofounder and chief executive of the most important company in energy was sharing his thoughts on the sector. That would be Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the head of the company that designs the chips that power many artificial intelligence models and applications.
During his one-hour chat with former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Friday, Huang focused mostly on what good AI could do for energy and grid efficiency, including weather simulation and designing smart grids. While it's true, Huang said, “that AI does take energy,” AI-trained models can predict weather and climate “tens of thousands of times more energy efficiently” than supercomputers. But he was also straightforward about the intense energy demands of training artificial intelligence models.
“These data centers could consume, today, maybe 100 megawatts. In the future it will be 10, 20 times more than that.” To reduce strain on the grid, these data centers could be located “where the energy” is located, Huang suggested. “The AI doesn't care where it goes to school.” And like a student, “it’s okay” if it sometimes has to “take a nap” when the sun’s not out. — Matthew
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Trump called himself “king” and tried to kill the program, but it might not be so simple.
The Trump administration will try to kill congestion pricing, the first-in-the-nation program that charged cars and trucks up to $9 to enter Manhattan’s traffic-clogged downtown core.
In an exclusive story given to the New York Post, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that he would rescind the U.S. Transportation Department’s approval of the pricing regime.
“The toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways,” Duffy told the Post.
He did not specify an end date for the program, but said that he would work with New York to achieve an “orderly termination” of the tolls. But it’s not clear that he can unilaterally end congestion pricing — and in any case, New York is not eager to work with him to do so.
The attempted cancellation adds another chapter to the decades-long saga over whether to implement road pricing in downtown New York. And it represents another front in the Trump administration’s war on virtually any policy that reduces fossil fuel use and cuts pollution from the transportation sector, the most carbon-intensive sector in the U.S. economy.
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” Trump posted on Truth Social, the social network that he owns. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
The Metropolitan Transit Authority, the state agency that oversees New York’s tolling and transit system, has filed to block the cancellation in court. In a statement, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that Trump didn’t have the authority to kill the tolling program.
“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” Hochul said. “We’ll see you in court.”
Since it started on January 5, congestion pricing has charged drivers up to $9 to drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street. With its launch, New York joined a small set of world capitals — including London, Singapore, and Stockholm — to use road pricing in its central business district.
Even in its first weeks in Gotham, congestion pricing had seemingly proven successful at its main goal: cutting down on traffic. Travel times to enter Manhattan have fallen and in some cases — such as driving into the Holland Tunnel from New Jersey — have been cut in half during rush hour, according to an online tracker built by economics researchers that uses Google Maps data.
Anecdotally, drivers have reported faster drive times within the city and much less honking overall. (I can affirm that downtown is much quieter now.) City buses zoomed through their routes, at times having to pause at certain stops in order to keep from running ahead of their schedules.
The program has been so successful that it had even begun to turn around in public polling. Although congestion pricing was incredibly unpopular during its long gestation, a majority of New Yorkers now support the program. In early February, six of 10 New Yorkers said that they thought Trump should keep the program and not kill it, according to a Morning Consult poll.
That matches a pattern seen in other cities that adopt congestion pricing, where most voters hate the program until they see that it successfully improves travel times and reduces traffic.
While Trump might now be claiming regal powers to block the program, the toll’s origin story has been democratic to a fault. Although congestion pricing has been proposed in New York for decades, the state’s legislature approved the program in 2019 as part of its long-running search for a permanent source of funding for the city’s trains and buses.
The federal government then studied the program for half a decade, first under Trump, then under Biden, generating thousands upon thousands of pages of environmental and legal review. At long last, the Biden administration granted final approval for the program last year.
But then congestion pricing had to clear another hurdle. In June, Hochul paused the program at the last moment, hoping to find another source of permanent funding for the city’s public transit system.
She didn’t. In November, she announced that the program would go into effect in the new year.
It’s not clear whether the Trump administration can actually kill congestion pricing. When the Biden administration approved the program, it did so essentially as a one-time finding. Duffy may not be able to revoke that finding — just like you can’t un-sign a contract that you’ve already agreed to.
In his letter to Hochul, Duffy argues that congestion pricing breaks a longstanding norm that federally funded highways should not be tolled. “The construction of federal-aid highways as a toll-free highway system has long been one of the most basic and fundamental tenets of the federal-aid Highway Program,” he says.
That argument is surprising because federal highways in Manhattan — such as the West Side Highway — are excluded from the toll by design. Drivers only incur the $9 charge when they leave highways and enter Manhattan’s street grid. And drivers can use the interstate highway system but avoid the congestion charge by entering uptown Manhattan through Interstate 95 and then parking north of 60th Street.
Duffy also argues that the tolling program is chiefly meant to raise revenue for the MTA, not reduce congestion. The federal government’s approval of pilot congestion pricing programs is aimed at cutting traffic, he says, not raising revenue for state agencies.
In its lawsuit, the MTA asserts that Duffy does not have the right to revoke the agreement. It also says that he must conduct the same degree of environmental review to kill the program that the first Trump administration required when the program was originally proposed.
“The status quo is that Congestion Pricing continues, and unless and until a court orders otherwise, plaintiffs will continue to operate the program as required by New York law,” the MTA’s brief says.
Whether they will or not depends on whether all politics really are local, anymore.
JD Vance had a message recently for Germans uneasy about the way Elon Musk has been promoting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party ahead of their country’s upcoming elections: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said at the Munich Security Conference. It was supposed to be a joke, but apparently the vice president of the United States is still peeved at the fact that he had to see a Swedish teenager on his TV saying that we ought to do something about climate change.
Just a throwaway line meant to convey the Trump administration’s general belligerence and contempt for Europeans? Perhaps. But it also communicated that the administration has had it with scolding, not to mention any government actions meant to confront planetary warming; in its first month in power, it has moved swiftly and aggressively to suspend or roll back just about every climate-related policy it could find.
Now congressional Republicans have to pass a budget, and in so doing decide what the law — and not just a bunch of executive orders — will do about all the existing programs to promote clean energy and reduce emissions. That means we’re headed for an intra-GOP conflict. On one side is ideology, in the form of a desire by the administration and many Republicans in Congress to eviscerate government spending in general and climate spending in particular. On the other side are the parochial interests of individual members, who want to make sure that their own constituents are protected even if it means their party doesn’t get everything it wants.
Climate hawks got optimistic last summer when 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson imploring him not to push for wholesale repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark 2022 climate law filled subsidies for clean energy, since their districts are benefiting from the boom in manufacturing the law helped spur. About 80% of the green energy funding from the IRA is going to Republican districts; in some places that means thousands of local jobs depend on the free flow of federal funds.
While some of the largest spending is concentrated in the South, especially the areas that have come to be known as the “Battery Belt,” there are hundreds of congressional districts around the country that benefit from IRA largesse. That’s an old best practice of policy design, one the defense industry has used to particularly good effect: The wider you spread the subcontracts or subsidies, the more members of Congress have jobs in their district that rely on the program and the safer it will be from future budget cuts.
The IRA could have some other allies in its corner; for instance, automakers that are struggling to bring the prices of their electric models to an affordable level will be lobbying to retain the tax subsidy that can reduce the sticker price of an electric vehicle by $7,500. There is already a backlash brewing to the administration’s freeze on climate-related programs in rural areas. Many farmers entered into contracts with the federal government in which they would be reimbursed for land conservation and renewable energy projects; after taking loans and laying out their own money believing the government would honor its part of the agreement, they’ve been left holding the bag.
So will Congress step in to ensure that some climate funding remains? This is the point in the story where we inevitably invoke former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s dictum that “All politics is local.” No matter what issue you’re working on, O’Neill insisted, what matters most is how it affects the folks back home, and the most successful politicians are those who know how to address their constituents’ most immediate problems.
Like many such aphorisms, it’s often true, but not always. While there are many members of Congress whose careers live or die on their ability to satisfy the particular needs of their districts, today national politics and party loyalty exert a stronger pull than ever. The correlation between presidential and House votes has grown stronger over time, meaning that voters overwhelmingly choose the same party for president and their own member of Congress. Even the most attentive pothole-filling representative won’t last long in a district that doesn’t lean toward their party.
Which is perfectly rational: Given the limited influence a single House member has, you might as well vote for the party you hope will control Washington rather than splitting your ticket, no matter who is on the ballot. That doesn’t mean members of Congress have stopped working to bring home the bacon, but it does mean that the pressure on them to deliver concrete benefits to the voters back home has lessened considerably. And when the congressional leadership says, “We really need your vote on this one,” members are more likely to go along.
There will be some horse-trading and pushback on the administration’s priorities as Congress writes its budget — for instance, farm state members are already angry about the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which buys billions of dollars of agricultural products from American farmers to distribute overseas, and will press to get that funding restored. And with a razor-thin majority in the House, individual members could have more leverage to demand that the programs that benefit their districts be preserved.
On the other hand, this is not an administration of compromisers and legislative dealmakers. Trump and his officials see aggression and dominance as ends in and of themselves, apart from the substance of any policy at issue. Not only are they determined to slash government spending in ways never seen before, they seem indifferent to the consequences of the cuts. For their part, Republicans in Congress seem willing to abdicate to Trump their most important power, to determine federal spending. And if Trump succeeds in his goal of rewriting the Constitution to allow the president to simply refuse to spend what the law requires, Congress could preserve climate spending only to see it effectively cancelled by the White House.
Which he would probably do, given that it is almost impossible to overstate the hostility Trump himself and those around him have for climate-related programs, especially those signed into law by Joe Biden. That’s true even when those programs support goals Trump claims to hold, such as revitalizing American manufacturing.
What those around Trump certainly don’t want to hear is any “scolding” about the effects of climate change, and they’re only slightly more open to arguments about the parochial interests of members of Congress from their own party. As in almost every budget negotiation, we probably won’t know until the last minute which programs survive and which get the axe. But there are going to be casualties; the only question is how many.
A new Data for Progress poll provided exclusively to Heatmap shows steep declines in support for the CEO and his business.
Nearly half of likely U.S. voters say that Elon Musk’s behavior has made them less likely to buy or lease a Tesla, a much higher figure than similar polls have found in the past, according to a new Data for Progress poll provided exclusively to Heatmap.
The new poll, which surveyed a national sample of voters over the President’s Day weekend, shows a deteriorating public relations situation for Musk, who has become one of the most powerful individuals in President Donald Trump’s new administration.
Exactly half of likely voters now hold an unfavorable view of Musk, a significant increase since Trump’s election. Democrats and independents are particularly sour on the Tesla CEO, with 81% of Democrats and 51% of independents reporting unfavorable views.
By comparison, 42% of likely voters — and 71% of Republicans — report a favorable opinion of Musk. The billionaire is now eight points underwater with Americans, with 39% of likely voters reporting “very” unfavorable views. Musk is much more unpopular than President Donald Trump, who is only about 1.5 points underwater in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average.
Perhaps more ominous for Musk is that many Americans seem to be turning away from Tesla, the EV manufacturer he leads. About 45% of likely U.S. voters say that they are less likely to buy or lease a Tesla because of Musk, according to the new poll.
That rejection is concentrated among Democrats and independents, who make up an overwhelming share of EV buyers in America. Two-thirds of Democrats now say that Musk has made them less likely to buy a Tesla, with the vast majority of that group saying they are “much less likely” to do so. Half of independents report that Musk has turned them off Teslas. Some 21% of Democrats and 38% of independents say that Musk hasn’t affected their Tesla buying decision one way or the other.
Republicans, who account for a much smaller share of the EV market, do not seem to be rushing in to fill the gap. More than half of Republicans, or 55%, say that Musk has had no impact on their decision to buy or lease a Tesla. While 23% of Republicans say that Musk has made them more likely to buy a Tesla, roughly the same share — 22% — say that he has made them less likely.
Tesla is the world’s most valuable automaker, worth more than the next dozen or so largest automakers combined. Musk’s stake in the company makes up more than a third of his wealth, according to Bloomberg.
Thanks in part to its aging vehicle line-up, Tesla’s total sales fell last year for the first time ever, although it reported record deliveries in the fourth quarter. The United States was Tesla’s largest market by revenue in 2024.
Musk hasn’t always been such a potential drag on Tesla’s reach. In February 2023, soon after Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Heatmap asked U.S. adults whether the billionaire had made them more or less likely to buy or lease a Tesla. Only about 29% of Americans reported that Musk had made them less likely, while 26% said that he made them more likely.
When Heatmap asked the question again in November 2023, the results did not change. The same 29% of U.S. adults said that Musk had made them less likely to buy a Tesla.
By comparison, 45% of likely U.S. voters now say that Musk makes them less likely to get a Tesla, and only 17% say that he has made them more likely to do so. (Note that this new result isn’t perfectly comparable with the old surveys, because while the new poll surveyed likely voters , the 2023 surveys asked all U.S. adults.)
Musk’s popularity has also tumbled in that time. As recently as September, Musk was eight points above water in Data for Progress’ polling of likely U.S. voters.
Since then, Musk has become a power player in Republican politics and been made de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. He has overseen thousands of layoffs and sought to win access to computer networks at many federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS, leading some longtime officials to resign in protest.
Today, he is eight points underwater — a 16-point drop in five months.
“We definitely have seen a decline, which I think has mirrored other pollsters out there who have been asking this question, especially post-election,” Data for Progress spokesperson Abby Springs, told me.
The new Data for Progress poll surveyed more than 1,200 likely voters around the country on Friday, February 14, and Saturday, February 15. Its results were weighted by demographics, geography, and recalled presidential vote. The margin of error was 3 percentage points.