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:
On a looming storm, Biden’s Climate Week event, and tripling renewables
Current conditions: Hurricane John is bringing dangerous storm surge to Mexico’s Pacific coast • Flash floods and landslides are inundating villages in northern Thailand • Phoenix officials confirmed the city had 113 straight days of temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer, breaking the previous record, set in 1993, of 76 days.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 41 of the state’s 67 counties ahead of a storm that is expected to slam into the state’s Gulf coast Thursday as a Category 3 or maybe even Category 4 hurricane. The executive order activates the Florida National Guard and emergency response teams. “As the system approaches, I'm urging Floridians to finalize their storm prep, monitor weather reports and follow the guidance of local authorities,” DeSantis said. “Stay Safe, Florida.”
AccuWeather
Tropical Storm Nine could strengthen into Hurricane Helene with maximum sustained wind gusts of 111-130 miles per hour, according to AccuWeather meteorologists. It could bring up to 12 inches of rain near the point of landfall, but flooding could happen as far north as the Ohio River Valley. Some parts of the Florida Panhandle could see up to 15 feet of storm surge. “This is going to be a life-threatening storm with dangerous storm surge,” said AccuWeather meteorologist Bernie Rayno. “The one factor that is alarming is how incredibly high water temperatures are, which can fuel rapid intensification right along the forecast track of this storm.”
President Biden will speak today at Climate Week NYC, taking the stage at the Bloomberg Global Business forum. His comments will highlight his administration’s climate agenda and clean energy policies and how they are “lowering costs, creating good-paying and union jobs, and reducing harmful emissions,” according to a White House statement. E&E Newsreported that many of Biden’s top energy and environmental officials are out in force, trying to remind everyone that the climate landscape would look very different under a Trump presidency.
Also happening at Climate Week today: The Global Renewables Summit, taking place at the Plaza Hotel. World leaders including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the president of this year’s COP29 summit will be expected to speak about the global goal to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. The International Energy Agency released a report today concluding that the goal, which was set at last year’s COP28, is within reach but only if countries ramp up transmission expansion and dramatically increase energy storage. “Further international cooperation is vital to deliver fit-for-purpose grids, sufficient energy storage and faster electrification, which are integral to move clean energy transitions quickly and securely,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. Another new report, from the International Renewable Energy Agency, found that 81% of the new renewable energy capacity added last year was cheaper than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, at the U.N. General Assembly, leaders of developing nations issued a plea for the world’s developed countries to stop paying “lip service” and lead the way on emissions cuts and climate finance.
The non-profit research foundation First Street released a new report yesterday examining the growing financial risks associated with climate disasters. Using its climate risk financial modeling tool, First Street found that 57 U.S. banks with a total of $627 billion in real estate loans could face material financial risk. Those loans represent nearly 11% of all loans in the country. Regional and community banks are especially vulnerable “given the concentrated nature of their lending portfolios.”
“Through climate risk financial modeling, we are able to get the first glimpse of the financial institutions which have material financial risk from their exposure to the physical impacts of climate change,” said Dr. Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street. “While this risk is material by definition, banks are finally in a position where they can proactively manage these risks to dramatically change their risk profile over time.”
The state of California is suing ExxonMobil, accusing the oil giant of lying about plastic being recyclable and overpromising on its “advanced recycling” technology. “We are asking the court to hold ExxonMobil fully accountable for its role in actively creating and exacerbating the plastics pollution crisis through its campaign of deception,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said. “The case opens a new front in the legal battles against oil and gas companies over climate and environmental issues,” explainedThe New York Times. But legal experts say the state will face an uphill battle in the suit.
“Even in states where coal makes up a large share of the power grid — such as West Virginia, Wyoming, or Missouri — EVs produce half as much CO2 as gasoline vehicle. That’s because EVs are much more energy efficiency than internal combustion vehicles. So even though coal is a dirtier energy source than gasoline or diesel, EVs need to far less of it (in the form of electricity) to drive an additional mile.” –Robinson Meyer explains why switching to an EV matters so much for the climate, as part of Heatmap’s new Decarbonize Your Life special report.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On new 2030 projections, stronger hurricanes, and green hydrogen
Current conditions: Rare rainstorms have flooded parts of the Sahara Desert • Storm Kirk is expected to bring flooding to parts of northern France • Wyoming’s 75,000-acre Elk Fire has been burning for nearly two weeks.
Hurricane Milton, currently a Category 5 storm, is expected to make landfall this evening near Tampa, Florida, as a Category 4 hurricane with 130 mph winds, according to the National Weather Service. It will bring between 10 and 15 feet of storm surge (possibly more, depending on which forecast you’re following), plus tornadoes. The conditions have already started to deteriorate and will continue to do so throughout the day. “There is no recent precedent for a major hurricane to take this path toward Florida,” said AccuWeather Director of Forecasting Operations Dan DePodwin. “This is an increasing significant risk of devastating, catastrophic impacts to this region.”
AccuWeather
Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels almost certainly made Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene a lot worse, according to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central. A storm like Hurricane Helene is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Separately, Climate Central looked at Hurricane Milton, which already has the distinction of being the fifth strongest Atlantic storm on record. The nonprofit’s findings show that Milton’s rapid intensification — one of the fastest and most powerful instances of the phenomenon in history — is primarily due to high sea surface temperatures in the weeks before Milton developed, which was made at least 400 times more likely by climate change and up to 800 times more likely.
“While hurricane seasons eventually end, global temperatures haven’t stopped going up,” wrote Heatmap’s Jeva Lange. “That, perhaps, is the more terrifying subtext of the attribution studies: There will be more Miltons and Helenes.”
There are several big energy reports out this week, and taken together, their findings tell a nuanced story of an energy transition that’s well underway, but still moving too slowly. Let’s start with the big one: The International Energy Agency’s Renewables 2024 report, published this morning. It says that the world is on track to add 5,500 gigawatts of new clean energy capacity by 2030, 80% of which will come from solar PV alone. That means renewables will account for half of global electricity generation by the end of the decade.
IEA
While this is huge progress (the report notes that 5,500 GW is roughly equal the power capacity of China, the European Union, India, and the U.S. combined), it is not enough to meet the COP28 goal of tripling renewable capacity by 2030. But! The IEA stresses that it is “entirely possible” to meet this target if governments can get their acts together, set bold new emission reduction targets in the coming months, and work together to lower the energy transition costs for poorer countries. “The market can deliver on renewables, and now governments need to prioritize investing in storage, grids, and other forms of clean flexibility to enable this transformation,” said Dave Jones, director of global insights at energy think tank Ember. “The next half decade is going to be one heck of a ride.”
So, that’s renewables. Let’s look at what all this means for emissions and, most importantly, warming.
An energy transition report published this morning from Norwegian risk management company DNV concludes, rather remarkably, that energy-related emissions are set to peak this year and begin a steady decline thanks to the plummeting costs of solar and batteries, especially in China. “Emissions peaking is a milestone for humanity,” said Remi Eriksen, group president and CEO of DNV. However, the projected rate of emission reduction is only enough to limit warming to 2.2 degrees Celsius by 2100. “We must now focus on how quickly emissions decline and use the available tools to accelerate the energy transition,” Eriksen added.
The Rhodium Climate Outlook 2024 report, out yesterday, concluded that there is a less than 7% chance of the world limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius “if current trends in policy and technology development continue.” In fact, it projected a “very likely” increase between 2 degrees Celsius and *gulp* 3.7 degrees Celsius by century’s end. However, odds of limiting warming to 2 degrees jump to 96% if all countries can get to net-zero emissions by 2070. To date, 149 countries (representing 88% of global emissions) have made net-zero or carbon neutrality commitments, though it remains to be seen if and when they’ll meet those goals.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
The cost of “green” hydrogen – that which is produced with clean energy – is likely to remain “prohibitively expensive,” according to a new study published yesterday in the journal Joule. The fuel is seen as key to curbing emissions from hard-to-abate sectors (industry, for example), and many are banking on the price of production falling. But the researchers say the high storage and distribution costs are often overlooked. Taking those costs into consideration, carbon capture and storage is cheaper than green hydrogen when it comes to curbing emissions, the researchers found. “Even if production costs decrease in line with predictions, storage and distribution costs will prevent hydrogen being cost-competitive in many sectors,” said lead author Roxana Shafiee, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. “Our results challenge a growing idea that hydrogen will be the ‘Swiss army knife of decarbonization’ and suggest that the opportunities for hydrogen may be narrower than previously thought.”
“After 40 years in a career, hopefully, I get a little leeway from the folks who are accustomed to seeing me cool as a cucumber. But the truth is that with climate-driven extremes putting us in a place that we haven’t been before, it’s very difficult to stay cool, calm, and collected.” –Meteorologist John Morales on his emotional on-air reaction to Hurricane Milton’s rapid intensification.
Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap staffers about why — and how — consumer choices matter.
How can you fight climate change in your daily life? Last month, Heatmap published our attempt at answering that question: Called Decarbonize Your Life, it’s a series of stories and guides to help you make better, smarter decisions to nudge the energy system away from fossil fuels. We consulted studies, ran our own analysis (with a little help from some friends), and used our expert judgment to arrive at six big, high-leverage actions you can take to fight climate change and cut carbon pollution.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with Heatmap’s deputy editor Jillian Goodman and founding staff writer Emily Pontecorvo about what those six big actions are, how the guide came together, and why big choices matter so much more than small ones. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: So it’s more than just the carbon impact which is the key here, right? This systemic leverage point that you’re trying to make is that you’re trying to think about — beyond just reducing emissions, which is important — how is that actually having some kind of systemic impact on reorienting the global capitalist system, right? That we all live in, towards where we want to go, towards what a net zero emissions lifestyle and society looks like.
Robinson Meyer: And instead of every dollar you spend going to the task of taking oil out of the ground, and the task of building more internal combustion cars, it’s going to the task of building more EVs and harvesting electricity. Anyway, Jillian, I interrupted you.
Jillian Goodman: I was just going to add — and again, I’m just paraphrasing you — every time you drive, it’s a marginal impact. Every single time you use the device. Not only are you emitting less in the short term, you’re emitting less in the long term. And as the grid gets cleaner, every time you drive your EV, your EV will get cleaner, as well.
Emily Pontecorvo: One other thing that we were thinking about a little bit is thinking about these actions in terms of, which ones are you, as an individual, you’re literally the one who’s burning the fossil fuels. When you drive your car, you are burning the gas. When you’re lighting your stove, you’re burning natural gas. And not to put it all on the individual, but you’re the one who has the power to say, Okay, I’m not gonna burn fossil fuels in my home anymore. And whereas with a few other actions — like with rooftop solar, with efficiency improvements — those are extremely important, and those are very high on our list for other reasons. But they’re more indirect.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
And made Helene so much worse, according to new reports from Climate Central and World Weather Attribution.
Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.
A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.
“Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene — we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy,” Friederike Otto, the lead of WWA and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “But vitally, we need the political will.” Alarmingly, the attribution study found that storms could drop an additional 10% or more rain on average as soon as the 2050s if warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius.
WWA’s study is not the first to be released on Hurricane Helene, but it was still produced incredibly quickly and has not been peer reviewed. Just a few weeks ago, the group issued a correction on a report estimating the contribution of climate change to recent flooding in Europe.
Separately, Climate Central looked at Hurricane Milton, which already has the distinction of being the fifth strongest Atlantic storm on record. The nonprofit’s findings show that Milton’s rapid intensification — one of the fastest and most powerful instances of the phenomenon in history — is primarily due to high sea surface temperatures in the weeks before Milton developed, which was made at least 400 times more likely by climate change and up to 800 times more likely. (WWA relied on Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index for oceans for its research, but found “climate change made the unusually hot sea surface temperature about 200-500 times more likely.”)
Attribution science is incredibly tricky, especially for a storm system like a hurricane that has variables ranging from wind shear to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation to ocean temperatures and jet stream variations. When I spoke to a member of the WWA team earlier this year, I was told the organization specifically avoids attributing the intensification of any individual hurricane — in theory, one of the more straightforward relationships — to climate change because of the relatively limited historical modeling available. Even something like rainfall “is not necessarily correlated to the magnitude of the floods that you see because there are other factors,” WWA’s Clair Barnes previously told me — for example, the steep-sided mountains and hollows of western North Carolina, which served as funnels for rainfall to an especially devastating effect.
But regarding the relationship between hurricanes and climate change more generally, “We’re relatively confident that storms will get more intense” in a warming world, Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton geoscientist, explained on a recent episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast. “And we’re really confident that storms will get wetter.”
Helene and Milton hammer that point home: once-in-a-generation storms can now arrive on back-to-back weekends. You can almost understand the impulse to devise a zany explanation as to why. Only, the truth is far simpler than cloud seeding or space lasers: a warmer atmosphere makes for warmer oceans, which make for wetter, more intense storms. And while hurricane seasons eventually end, global temperatures haven’t stopped going up. That, perhaps, is the more terrifying subtext of the attribution studies: There will be more Miltons and Helenes.