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New England’s colors are a disappointment. The West is riotous. Welcome to our weird new normal.
Discussing fall foliage with the experts can make you feel a little like you’re on an episode of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?
“The leaves change color — you remember this from elementary school — because of chlorophyll,” Kyle Cotner, the creator of The Foliage Report, said to me, demonstrating outsized confidence in my grade-school recall. “If you remember back to an art class,” Dr. Howard Neufeld, a professor of biology at Appalachian State University who’s also known as the Fall Color Guy, prompted me later, “if you have a red pigment, what’s its complementary color?” (Folks, it’s not “blue” — it’s green.)
But while the autumn portion of the tree life cycle may be a staple of primary school pop quizzes, it’s also a dizzyingly complicated phenomenon and one that’s been behaving … well, oddly. “There’s much less overall consistency and pattern,” Dr. John O’Keefe, the lead phenology scientist at the Harvard Forest, told me of the fall color he’s been seeing recently. “It’s just bigger extremes. And that’s, of course, one of the things that climate change is causing: wilder swings.”
Neufeld, who works out of North Carolina, has seen the same thing in his neck of the woods. Looking back over his 17 years of data recently, he noticed that “the peak color was always the same time of year: the 10th to the 20th of October,” he told me. But “starting in 2017, it’s all over the place.” Sometimes the peak colors would come two weeks late; other times it’d be early, or arrive on time. “As a biostatistician, I went back and I calculated how variable the timing was. And it’s twice as variable in these recent years as it is in the first eight years,” he said.
Neufeld stressed that his observations are not statistically significant yet, but he suspects that in a few more years, and with a few more data points, they will be. “My suspicion is that it’s the beginning of a climate change effect,” he said.
This sort of unpredictability is especially worrying because leaf peeping is estimated by Neufeld to be a $25 to $30 billion industry in the eastern U.S. alone during a strong fall color year. The number of fluctuating variables — from rainfall to temperature to cloud cover to fungi to one badly timed windstorm — can leave the towns and people who rely on autumn tourism feeling destabilized. Will this year be a good year? Will it not be, and word will get out, suppressing the crowds?
If there were ever a year for climate change to be impacting fall colors, it’d be this one. But the precise reason came as some surprise. It’s not the late heat, but the abnormal amount of rain that’s been the more significant variable at a local level. As Neufeld pointed out, “September was the warmest on record — but not in North Carolina and especially not in the mountains.”
That precipitation, which is also more likely because of climate change, has been both a boon and a bust for fall color. “With so much rain, the colors will not be as vibrant [in the northeast],” said Cotner, who tracks the trends nationally. “I’ve noticed places like Stowe, Vermont, are much duller this season and turning brown … I can tell you, I’m truly disappointed with the region compared to last year.”
But at the same time, the rainy trends in the Western United States have pulled the region out of its drought and created “probably the best [fall color] year in a decade,” Cotner went on, “especially the three all-star states: Colorado, Utah, California. Utah probably wins.”
One of the most underrated fall foliage states.— The Foliage Report (@The Foliage Report) 1696264849
While the main theme of fall leaves has been to expect the unexpected, it’s also true that “there is a slight trend toward [peak color] getting later over the 30 years that I’ve been watching,” O’Keefe, in Massachusetts, noted. It’s an observation that tracks with the greater climate research: Between 1952 and 2011, fall decreased from 87 days to 82 days, chipped away at by the lengthening summer. In general, “sunny days and cooler, crisp nights are when we develop the brightest colors,” O’Keefe said, but fall temperatures have increased on average by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit across the U.S. since 1970, Climate Central reports, and by as much as 4.5 degrees in parts of Vermont.
Of course, there’s more in jeopardy than tourism and Caitlin Covington’s Instagram content. Should the weird fall weather continue, then the actual makeup of the fall scenery could also start to change. Less hardy trees of one color might be beaten out by more competitive trees of another. Southern trees could begin to move north, and northern trees could retreat into Canada, or uphill to cooler elevations. Spectacular orange-and-yellow-and-red hillsides might become more monochromatic. When the forest ecologies change, the autumn landscapes will change in turn. Leaf peepers are just witnessing the aftermath.
But remember those brilliant 5th graders? They’ve got a part in all this, too. Fall colors “get more people out seeing nature than almost any other time of the year,” Nuefeld said. “So I'm hoping that when people go out and see them, they have a better appreciation of nature and want to do something to preserve it, so that their kids can go out when they’re their age to see the full color, too.”
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On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”