You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
One possible explanation for the extremely hot temperatures of recent years: removing the sulfur dioxide from shipping fuels.
The world has been very hot lately. Like, really hot. Much hotter than you might expect from climate change alone.
In 2023, the global average temperature was nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above its pre-industrial level. It is nearly certain to exceed that milestone in 2024.
These are extreme leaps. For context, 2019 was the second-hottest year on record when it happened, and it was merely 0.95 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. So Earth’s temperature has seemingly surged half a degree Celsius in five years.
These searingly hot temperatures aren’t completely outside the range climate models predict, but they are arriving sooner than most scientists thought, and climate researchers haven’t yet reached a consensus explanation for why they are happening.
This week, though, we got somewhat closer. A new study adds to a growing literature suggesting that a change to global shipping fuels has accidentally contributed to a surge in warming.
In 2020, the International Maritime Organization began enforcing rules that removed a toxic air pollutant, sulfur dioxide, from shipping fuels. Sulfur dioxide can inflame and irritate the heart and lungs, trigger asthma attacks, and can cause acid rain. But it can also reflect heat back into space, cooling the Earth.
These cooling effects of sulfur dioxide are very short-lived, and sulfur dioxide only sticks around in the atmosphere for about a week and a half. (Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, can persist in the atmosphere for a millennium.)
It now seems that all those sulfur aerosols were likely reflecting enough heat back into space to make a noticeable difference in the Earth’s temperature rise. The new study, written by the researchers Ilaria Quaglia and Daniele Visioni, finds that removing sulfur dioxide from shipping fuel likely increased the planet’s temperature by 0.08 degrees Celsius.
This change alone can’t explain the Earth’s recent surge in temperature rise. But the new rules likely made the record-breaking temperatures in 2023 roughly 12 times likelier than they would have been had the rules not changed, Visioni, an atmospheric chemistry professor at Cornell, told me.
“The likelihood of something like 2023 happening — was it made larger, was it made bigger, by this contribution? We found, yes,” he said.
The timing of the surge — and the fact that the most anomalously warm part of the planet has been the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, a popular shipping route — also support the conclusion that the IMO rules are playing an effect.
Other factors — including natural fluctuations in Earth’s multi-year climate cycles, like El Niño — may have helped the surge along too, Visioni said. “If you take a probabilistic approach, you can say, even without the shipping rules, 2023 wouldn’t have been completely impossible,” he added. “But you cannot evaluate the truthfulness of probability from one outcome because you only have one world.” In other words, both climate change and our response to it are part of the same poorly designed experiment — and we can only run that experiment once.
Over the past 12 months, several other papers have reached a similar conclusion, although they disagree about the magnitude of the IMO’s accidental cooling effect. Quaglia and Visioni’s study finds one of the largest effects.
The literature suggests that sulfur dioxide’s effects are “in the range of three hundredths to eight hundredths of a degree Celsius, but I don’t know that we can say that we're on the high or low end of that,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist who studies carbon removal technologies at the tech company Stripe, told me. Hausfather has his own estimate of how much shipping rules have affected the recent warming episode — about five hundredths of a degree Celsius — which he reached with Piers Forster, a climate physics professor at the University of Leeds.
The exact magnitude of the effect, though, might matter less than the fact that it happened at all. For Visioni, the results demonstrate that policymakers need to think more intentionally about the tradeoffs between cutting toxic air pollution emissions and losing the cooling effect those same toxic emissions produce.
Over the past few decades, humanity has gotten better at cutting toxic air pollution from power plants and industrial activities than previous climate models estimated. That means that, somewhat paradoxically, it might be more difficult to stay below the Paris Agreement’s 2 degrees C warming goal because the same levels of greenhouse gas emissions will now have a greater warming effect than they would have in 2015.
It’s time to discuss this trade-off frankly and head-on, he told me. That also means taking seriously — and beginning research — on the proposition that humanity may want to experiment with intentionally releasing some forms of aerosols to suppress the planet’s warming — something the international shipping community has historically been loath to do.
In 2013, a paper from Finnish researchers suggested that ships could retain the climate benefits of sulfur aerosol pollution — while mitigating most of their public health downsides — by burning clean fuels near the coasts, but dirtier fuel on the open ocean. Under that scenario, shipping emissions would actually have reflected even more heat than they did at the time. But the group downplayed that scenario in part because it was a potential form of geoengineering.
Is it? It’s not clear where the line of “intentionality” in geoengineering lies, Visioni said. If you stop doing something bad for the environment, but it has a warming effect on the climate, are you geoengineering? Or are you passing prudent environmental policy? The question of where geoengineering begins or ends gets harder and harder to adjudicate — especially while humanity conducts what is in essence the largest and most important geo-engineering experiment possible by burning fossil fuels and releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere.
Visioni made a point to emphasize that he’s in favor of the IMO’s efforts to clean up shipping emissions. “Do we keep polluting? No. I think we should be forceful and say no,” he said.
“But on the other hand, my wish would be if we started discussions a bit more like, ‘Okay, so do we think that these [warming] thresholds are so important? And if so, are we willing to have a discussion about what we could do to prevent this warming from happening?”
Visioni’s paper is not the only new study that seeks to explain the warming blip. On Friday, a team of German researchers wrote in Science that a recent and mysterious decline in low-altitude clouds in the atmosphere has decreased the planet’s brightness. Clouds, like sulfur aerosol emissions, reflect heat back into space, and so their decline would also contribute to a warming surge.
They provide another piece of evidence that the surge in warming is caused by some fundamental change to the climate system and not by a multiu-seasonal hiccup like El Niño. “The big question that we have is: Is this a blip or not?” Hausfather said. “If we're in the world where El Nino is behaving weirdly, that’s kind of the comforting one, because it means we’ll go back to normal — normal here being a rapidly warming world. If the spike in warming over the past two years is due to natural variability, it means it will likely be shortlived.”
The more worrying possibility, he continued, is that something more fundamental has changed in the climate system. Climate scientists describe these shifts as a change in “radiative forcings,” meaning a change in the basic dynamics that force adjustments in the energy balance between the Earth, the Sun, and outer space.
“If this is a change in forcings — which clouds or aerosols would imply — then that change in forcing would likely persist. It would be a factor that continues affecting the climate in the future, rather than just a blip,” Hausfather said.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The AI-powered startup aims to provide home-level monitoring and data to utilities.
In theory at least, an electrified household could play a key role in helping stabilize the grid of the future, alleviating times of peak electricity demand by providing power back to the grid and giving utilities timely warnings about hardware that may be failing. But devices used to measure and monitor power demand today, such as smart meters, aren’t advanced enough to do this type of orchestrated power management and fault detection at a granular level — thus leaving both financial and grid efficiency savings on the table.
Enter Utilidata, which just raised a $60 million Series C funding round to get its artificial intelligence-powered software module into smart meters and other pieces of grid infrastructure. This module acts as the brains of a device, and can provide utilities with localized insights into things like electricity usage levels, the operations of distributed energy resources such as home solar and batteries, anomalies in voltage data, and hardware faults. By forecasting surges or lulls in electricity demand, Utilidata can optimize power flow, and by predicting when and where faults are likely to occur, it empowers utilities to strategically upgrade their grid infrastructure, or at least come up with contingency plans before things fail.
The company’s AI system enables all of this analysis to happen at the grid edge — the point at which the electricity system enters a customer’s home — as opposed to in a centralized cloud, which reduces bandwidth needs and allows for immediate responses.
“There's enough capability at that node to optimize multiple complex decisions and create a better holistic outcome for the customer on the grid,” Utilidata CEO Josh Brumberger told me. The company did a trial recently with the Electricity Power Research Institute that showed promising cost savings and reduced grid strain. “We were able to reduce the customer’s bill by 12.5% and shave peak [usage] by 25%,” he told me.
Utilida’s series C was led by the clean energy investor Renown Capital Partners, with support from strategic investors such as the electricity infrastructure company Quanta and Nvidia, which Utilidata partnered with to create its AI platform.
It will still be a while before Utilidata-powered smart meters allow for automated load management down to the household level, Brumberger told me, calling this the “Holy Grail” of grid operations. That’s because making load adjustments across interconnected systems is a complex task that needs to be perfectly coordinated, often with strict regulatory oversight and opt-in from participating customers. Utilities are famously cautious about adopting new technologies such as this one, as a mishap leading to a blackout can have catastrophic consequences.
A nearer term use case, Brumberger explained, would be detecting local power glitches more quickly, or forecasting when these failures might occur. For example, a new electric vehicle in the neighborhood could potentially overload local electrical distribution equipment. Utilidata could allow the utility to replace the equipment before anything goes wrong, thus enhancing grid resiliency. Insights such as this, Brumberger said, are “going to have value immediately.”
Already Utilidata has partnered with Aclara, a large manufacturer of smart meters, to install its AI module. One day, Brumberger told me, he wants to see the tech in other grid infrastructure such as transformers, EV chargers, or automatic circuit breakers known as reclosers.
Naturally, Brumberg is also excited about the potential of integrating Utilidata’s technology into data centers, telling me he sees opportunities to deploy the company’s AI modules “at the server level, at the rack level, and at the row level, all the way up to that interconnection point,” in order to help data centers run more efficiently. As the AI boom drives data center electricity demand through the roof, Utilidata is a classic example of AI helping to ameliorate the very problem it’s created.
“Every watt of energy that does not go towards compute because it's either lost or is going towards cooling is a wasted watt,” Brumberg told me. “And so the more granular and distributed your visibility and controls are, the more efficient and valuable a system you'll have.”
On fired climate scientists, the California waiver, and Tesla’s Semi
Current conditions: Severe weather warnings continue through this evening in parts of Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota, with strong tornadoes remaining a possible threat • It will be 85 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, D.C. today, about 14 degrees above average • Late afternoon thunderstorms are expected in Ottawa, where Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre is out of a job after Monday’s snap election, which also saw Liberal Mark Carney elected to a full term as Canada’s prime minister.
On Monday, the Trump administration dismissed all of the nearly 400 contributors to the National Climate Assessment, the congressionally mandated review of how global warming impacts the United States. According to the termination email, the Sixth Climate Assessment, due out in 2028, is “being reevaluated” by the administration, although one former contributor pointed out to The New York Times that “if you get rid of all the people involved, nothing’s moving forward.”
The move follows a series of targeted attacks by the Trump administration on the country’s ability to monitor the impacts of climate change, including the termination of contracts with global research partners and the reduction of funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which the conservative policy blueprint Project 2025 has described as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate and Security, slammed the decision on Bluesky, writing, “Pretending climate risks don’t exist doesn’t make them go away, unfortunately. This move puts Americans, our communities, and our security at risk.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, the Fifth Climate Assessment, published in 2023, contained a grim accounting of the stakes: that “every region in the world is projected to face further increases in climate hazards” without “urgent, effective, and equitable” progress away from our current rate of greenhouse gas emissions.”
On Monday, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation sent a letter to every member of the House of Representatives, urging them to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s waiver for California to set vehicle emissions standards stricter than the federal government’s when the matter goes to a vote this week. The Washington D.C.-based trade association, which represents Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, and others, argued that companies were being “forced to substantially reduce the number of overall vehicles for sale to inflate their proportion of electric vehicles sales.”
Many are skeptical that Congress actually has the authority to revoke the waiver under the Congressional Review Act; the Government Accountability Office and Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough have both stated that the waiver does not fall into the category of “rules” that the CRA can block. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation remains hopeful, however, going on to refer erroneously to the waiver as a “gas vehicle ban” and adding that it will “reduce vehicle choices for consumers across the country at precisely the same time they are adjusting to the marketplace shock of 25% tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts.”
Tesla
Tesla announced Monday that it plans to produce its Semi electric trucks at its Nevada gigafactory campus by the end of the year. “We’ll be ramping the factory throughout 2026,” Dan Priestley, the head of Tesla’s Semi program, said in a video posted to Twitter, adding that the factory can produce as many as 50,000 units per year. Tesla first scheduled production to begin in 2019, with CEO Elon Musk subsequently promising in 2022 that 50,000 Semis would be in production by 2024.
If Congress votes to repeal California’s ability to set stricter car and truck pollution standards, however, it could take a big bite out of the anticipated demand for the Semis. Separately, Massachusetts earlier this month postponed enforcement of its rule requiring manufacturers of medium- and heavy-duty trucks to sell an increasing number of zero-emission vehicles beginning in 2025.
Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency received an email Monday offering them another opportunity to take a voluntary retirement or a deferred resignation, USA Today reports. The agency has already reduced its staff by at least 1,000 workers as part of the administration’s efforts to downsize the federal workforce; current employees have until May 5 to accept one of the two new options. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has previously said he intends to cut the agency’s spending by 65%. At the same time, Russ Vought, the influential head of the Office of Management and Budget, has taken a particularly aggressive attitude toward the EPA, stating in a 2023 speech, “We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
When the long overdue Cascadia earthquake eventually strikes the northwest coast of the United States, the entire coastline could drop by nearly 7 feet — which suggests not only that more than twice the number of people and structures are at risk than originally thought, but also that said risk will continue to worsen over the next 75 years due climate change-driven sea-level rise. That’s according to new research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which also found that following such an earthquake, flooding events along the coast could dramatically worsen. “The land persists down” after an event of such a magnitude, and it can last for decades or centuries, meaning “any areas that are kind of on the cusp of the floodplain are now it,” lead author Tina Dura told NBC News.
As I’ve previously reported for Heatmap, there is additional increased danger in the event of the Cascadia earthquake — known colloquially as “the Big One” — due to the recent cuts at NOAA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In the immediate aftermath of the expected earthquake, the Washington and Oregon coasts will be hit by a massive tsunami, the damage of which will also increase as sea levels rise. Seismologists estimate a 15% chance that a magnitude 8.0 or greater earthquake will strike the region within the next 50 years.
New England recorded its lowest ever electricity demand on its six-state regional grid on Sunday, thanks in part to the region’s many “behind-the-meter” rooftop solar resources.
Some of the arguments will ring a bell to anyone who’s been following fights against renewables.
Indiana has power. Indiana has transmission. Indiana has a business-friendly Republican government. Indiana is close to Chicago but — crucially — not in Illinois. All of this has led to a huge surge of data center development in the “Crossroads of America.” It has also lead to an upswell of local opposition.
There are almost 30 active data center proposals in Indiana, plus five that have already been rejected in the past year, according to data collected by the environmentalist group Citizens Action Coalition. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all announced projects in the state since the beginning of 2024.
Nipsco, one of the state’s utilities, has projected 2,600 megawatts worth of new load by the middle of the next decade as its base scenario, mostly attributable to “large economic development projects.” In a more aggressive scenario, it sees 3,200 megawatts of new load — that’s three large nuclear reactors’ worth — by 2028 and 8,600 megawatts by 2035. While short of, say, the almost 36,500 megawatts worth of load growth planned in Georgia for the next decade, it’s still a vast range of outcomes that requires some kind of advanced planning.
That new electricity consumption will likely be powered by fossil fuels. Projected load growth in the state has extended a lifeline to Indiana’s coal-fired power plants, with retirement dates for some of the fleet being pushed out to late in the 2030s. It’s also created a market for new natural gas-fired plants that utilities say are necessary to power the expected new load.
State and local political leaders have greeted these new data center projects with enthusiasm, Ben Inskeep, the program director at CAC, told me. “Economic development is king here,” he said. “That is what all the politicians and regulators say their number one concern is: attracting economic development.”
This can sometimes mean policies to support data center development that CAC describes as giveaways, such as utility customers having to cover the bill for transmission upgrades and a 50-year sales tax exemption specifically for data centers. It’s all in the name of economic development and job growth, but that comes at “the detriment of ratepayers and taxpayers,” Inskeep told me.
Take that sales tax exemption: A 1,000 megawatt data center might face $500 million in annual electricity costs, Inskeep told me. “If they’re not having to pay that 7% sales tax on half a billion dollars, times 50 years, we’re talking about $1.7 billion per data center in sales tax exemption, just on the electricity portion of their bill,” Inskeep said.
Even that $500 million is not guaranteed. The minimum payment for such a data center has to pay is $332 million — having been doubled from just $173 million after CAC petitioned for an increase. Ratepayer advocates celebrated the settlement because it guaranteed that large data centers would pay for some of the costs they impose on the whole electrical system, even if their actual consumption is not as high as forecast.
Indiana is “an ideal jurisdiction for data center siting given its physical advantages such as available land, access to grid transmission, water, fiber optic cables, proximity to population centers,” Mizuho Securities analyst Gabriel Moreen wrote in a note to clients. “The state has demonstrated a political and economic receptivity to data centers, such as tax incentives for building data centers and political support at local and state levels.”
But cracks in that edifice of political support may be beginning to show. While data center development has substantial support from the state government — a bill tospeed up regulatory approvals for data centers and the generation to serve them is on Governor Mike Braun’s desk after a party-line statehouse vote — projects are also being withdrawn in the face of popular outrage.
Earlier this month, county commissioners in Kosciusko County rejected a rezoning proposition that would have been necessary for a data center project on rural land near Leesburg after a number of local residents spoke out against it. Before that, the city of Valparaiso rejected a data center project in March, following a city council meeting where residents complained about “ noise, power and water consumption and the impact on property values,” according to Lakeshore Public Media.
The objections in Kosciusko County and across the state will not be unfamiliar to anyone with experience in large scale development — residents don’t like noise; they worry that the projects will lead to higher electricity costs across the board; they’re skeptical of the job benefits; they think the developers are getting taxpayer giveaways; they don’t want to see agricultural land converted for the sake industry.
“That’s a big red flag for a lot of local governments where they’re a bit more skeptical of those types of development,” Inskeep told me.
Of course, these objections will be familiar to anyone who follows local opposition to renewable power developments like wind and solar, which regularly draw on farm land, noise, and skepticism of promised economic benefits.
And just like with solar and wind, these local objections could be slowing a projected build out that many analysts simply assume will follow an exponential path — which would, ironically, put a dent in the demand growth that many energy developers, renewable or not, are hoping to ride to more profits.
But at the local level, for activists, the fight happens one project at a time, Inskeep told me.
“We’re building out tools to help local folks feel like they have the knowledge and the resources to be able to engage at these local levels. Because when we have several dozen data center proposals in the state of Indiana and more coming, a small organization like ours can’t be there for each individual fight,” Inskeep said.