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This summer was hot. It was wet. It was deadly. For most of us, it was a preview of the rest of our lives.
So here we are: Another summer in the books.
After Labor Day, whites go back in the closet; kids go back to school. Astronomically speaking, there are still technically 20 days left of summer, and climatologically speaking, we may have even longer to go than that — summers are getting longer as autumns contract. But culturally, anyway, we’re now headed into fall, an incongruous transition epitomized by the bastardized existence of the iced pumpkin spice latte. You know you’re living in the age of climate change when ...
It’s a good time, though, for taking stock. An astonishing 96% of Americans have faced at least one extreme weather alert from the National Weather Service since May 1, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Danger Season tracker reports. Further, only seven counties out of 3,224 in the whole country and its territories had no heat, flood, fire, or storm warnings between May 1 and August 29 of this year, according to additional numbers supplied to Heatmap by the UCS — including, surprisingly, San Fransisco County in California, home of what has been called the single-most economically vulnerable major city to climate change in the U.S.
These were the others that dodged extreme weather alerts: Aleutians East Borough (Alaska); Aleutians West Census Area (Alaska); Ketchikan Gateway Borough (Alaska); Kodiak Island Borough (Alaska); and Norton City (Virginia). Together, they have a population of around 39,500 — just a fraction of San Francisco County’s 815,200.
But while San Francisco, some islands and bays in remote regions of Alaska, and a sliver of Virginia got lucky (this time and so far), it was a bad summer to be in Arizona, where there were more NWS extreme weather alerts issued than in any other state. Coconino County, home of the capital of Flagstaff, saw 146 alerts this summer due to a parade of heat, flood, and fire threats, followed closely by Mohave County, in the state’s northwesternmost corner, with a total of 145. New Mexico was right on Arizona’s tail with five counties in the top 10:
When it came to heat alerts specifically, Texas and Puerto Rico dominated the top of the list. In fact, Louisiana’s Sabine Parish was the highest-ranked non-Texan or Puerto Rican county for heat alerts, clocking in way down at #96.
The most flood alerts were experienced by California’s Inyo County, the home of Death Valley, which might be surprising until you remember how little rain it takes to trigger a disaster in the desert. Washington’s Yakima, Kittitas, and Skamania counties lead the list for fire weather alerts; and South Carolina’s Georgetown, Colleton, and Charleston counties lead for storm alerts. (The data was collected just before the brunt of Hurricane Idalia swept through northern Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas). California’s Los Angeles County, the most populous in the country, faced a total of 80 extreme weather alerts this summer; the average for all counties was around 44.
The UCS Danger Season data (which will continue to be collected here through October) did not account for air quality warnings, which were the main story of the early summer in the U.S. — at times, more than a third of Americans faced degraded AQI due to smoke billowing south from the Canadian wildfires (which are themselves record-breaking). June 7 was the worst day for wildfire smoke exposure in American history “by far,” my colleague Robinson Meyer reported, and it happened not on the West Coast, where fires are routine, but in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Toronto.
The next month, July, was the hottest month on Earth in probably 120,000 years (so you have that bragging right on about 4,000 or so generations of your ancestors). Some 40,000 different locations around the world recorded their hottest days ever in 2023, with nearly 20,000 of those in the United States, according to NOAA’s records. Though we didn’t break the global heat record this year (Death Valley only reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit, short of the 130 it needed to beat), the planet recorded its warmest day ever a few different times. Meanwhile, Vermont saw catastrophic summer flooding.
Then, in August, a grass fire fueled by hurricane winds ripped through Maui. Even three weeks later, we still don’t know how many people were killed. Undoubtedly, though, it is the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history — and all the more shocking for the fact that it burned through a former wetland, a grim testament to the effects of colonialism. America might not be through reckoning with massive fires, either; the peak of fire season is known as “Snaptember” among hot shot crews for a reason.
And summer wasn’t through with us yet. Hilary became the first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years, and while the damage wasn’t too bad, the Los Angeles Times credits the urgency of the early warnings for saving lives. Subsequently, Hurricane Idalia became the first hurricane to make U.S. landfall in what is predicted to be an “above normal” season, strengthening from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm in 24 hours thanks to record-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Reports of the damage are still trickling in, but it can’t be good news for insurers in Florida and the Southeast.
It is difficult to tie any one weather-related disaster to climate change, but as Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, once succinctly put it to Mother Jones: “It’s not: Climate change flooded my house. It’s: Climate change changed the chances of flooding my house.” So, let’s look at the chances.
A recent study found that the prime wildfire conditions in Canada this year, which caused the choking smoke on the East Coast, were “at least twice as likely to occur there as they would be in a world that humans hadn’t warmed by burning fossil fuels,” The New York Times reports. The July heat dome that baked the South was “at least five times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” an analysis by Climate Central and The Guardian found. The odds of Vermont’s supposedly once-a-century flooding happening within 12 years of another 100-year storm in the state, Hurricane Irene, was just 0.6 percent. The fires in Maui were caused by compounding climate problems, The Washington Post reports, such as higher average temperatures and more intense hurricanes — both of which also have links to emissions-fueled warming. And Hurricane Idalia’s rapid intensification is what we’d expect to see from human-fueled ocean warming, too. Then there’s El Niño, which plays a part in all this chaos as well; it’s why scientists expect next year to be an even bumpier ride for earthly life than this summer has been.
That might not be very heartening to hear but consider this: If you’re a resident of anywhere other than San Francisco and a few odd places like Alaska’s Bristol Bay Borough (population: 838), then this summer was your dry run. You’ve learned more than you ever expected you’d need to know about indoor air purification; you spent 90 minutes prepping for wildfire season; you’ve checked in on elderly neighbors; you’ve even brushed up on your gin rummy skills so you can stay off your phone when the power goes out during the next (or same?!) hurricane. Look at you go. You’re adaptable. Heck, even iced pumpkin spice lattes are starting to grow on you now.
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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.