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This is where the weather starts.
Florida seems to be getting hit from all sides. The ocean is so hot that people can’t cool off in it. Insurers are pulling out of the state. The governor is in a knockout fight with both Disney and Donald Trump. Dust carried all the way from the Saharan Desert is in the air above Floridians’ heads.
Actually, that last one’s fine. It is, in fact, normal. The dust that’s coming to the state now is part of a regular cycle called the Saharan Air Layer that, as my colleague Robinson Meyer recently wrote, has been delayed this summer, contributing to the weirdly hot waters off Florida. But it’s not just the dust: to understand what the summer in Florida — and the Southeast at large — is going to look like, we have to turn to West Africa.
Let’s start with the dust. The dust storms that make up the Saharan Air Layer start out in (surprise!) the Sahara desert and can be as big as the lower 48 states before they weaken as they move across the ocean. When they hit Florida they make the air about a mile above the ground extremely hot and dry, while the air below remains soupy and humid. That hot, dry air a mile up is essentially a cloud-killer: any potential hurricanes would dissipate in those conditions, but so do the thunderstorms that would otherwise bring some cooling rain to the state.
For the most part, the dust isn’t anything to worry about, said Jason Dunion, a meteorologist and field program director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), though there might be a dip in air quality that people in sensitive groups — anyone with a lung condition like asthma, or senior citizens — should watch out for. The current dust storm will move on in a few days, and another will arrive a few days later to take its place. Unfortunately, the dust won’t quite do much in terms of cooling down the ocean.
“The world’s oceans are out of balance from where they’ve been for the last 125,000 years,” Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, told me. “We’re seeing warming in the global oceans that is really quite bonkers.”
Exactly what is causing the ocean to warm — as in the literal physical effects behind that warming — will no doubt be the subject of many papers to come, Kirtman said, but there’s little doubt that anthropogenic climate change is the root cause.
That warmer water has many effects, the first being that the water off Florida is essentially now a hot tub, so the ocean breeze blowing into cities like Miami doesn’t have the cooling effect it usually does. That raises the heat index, putting people at risk of heat stroke. Higher ocean temperatures are also putting marine life — particularly coral reefs, which support thousands of sea creatures — in danger, as The New York Timesreported this week.
Then there’s the way warmer oceans impact hurricanes. This year marked the start of an El Niño, the weather pattern that usually brings less intense hurricane seasons. But, Kirtman told me, “the Atlantic is so flipping warm that the El Nino effect might not give us a weaker hurricane season.”
This is where we return, again, to West Africa. The dust, the hurricanes, the ocean temperatures: all of these are deeply, intricately connected.
“The hurricane nursery for the Atlantic is just south of the Sahara,” said Dunion “More than half the named storms we get in the Atlantic come from that nursery. So it’s a really important place to look at.”
Many hurricanes are born right off the coast of West Africa, between the Sahara and an area known as the Sahel. The hot air from the Sahara collides with colder air caused by storms in the Sahel, creating what Dunion called “tropical waves” that ripple outwards. These are the seedlings of hurricanes.
A warmer ocean sees more evaporation, which moves water vapor up through the atmosphere and usually intensifies hurricanes. This is true throughout their life cycle, and the waters off Western Africa, while not quite as warm as they are near Florida, are also much warmer than normal — in the high 70s or low 80s Fahrenheit, Dunion told me, and “80 degrees is that magic number where once we get to that temperature it's very conducive for exchanging energy from the ocean to the atmosphere.”
That heat means the hurricane nursery below the Sahara Desert could produce some especially strong storms, especially once the dust storms stop. “There’s a switch point in mid-August where the dust outbreaks start to subside.” Dunion said. “That may help open a window to make the environment much more juicy to support some of these storms,”
So the hurricanes could start especially strong, and will grow even stronger when they bump into the warm waters off the coast of Florida. Together, that could negate the effects of the El Niño; NOAA has predicted a near-normal hurricane season for this year, with somewhere in the range of 12 to 17 storms, in part because of the warmer oceans offsetting the El Niño.
That would be striking: if NOAA’s predictions hold, we’ll be in for a summer defined by the worst effects of an El Niño, like searing heat, without any of the hurricane-mitigating benefits. But, Dunion told me, the weather is ever-shifting and there are still many unknowns.
“What we don’t know is what the future is going to look like in the next month,” he said. “Will these dust outbreaks kind of ramp up really quickly? Will the sea surface temperatures settle out? That part is still a mystery. We can monitor it, but predicting exactly how it will play out is the humbling part of being a meteorologist.”
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If you want to donate to fight climate change, what’s the best way to spend your money?
For the past five years, Giving Green has been trying to find out. Each year, the nonprofit recommends a set of nonprofits that are trying to solve the climate problem effectively and efficiently, and get the world closer to decarbonization.
Giving Green, in other words, is somewhat like the climate-specific version of Givewell, an uber-utilitarian group that identifies which global charities maximize the number of lives saved per dollar spent. But it’s much more difficult— or at least much less clear — to identify which nonprofits might best fight climate change than it is which nonprofits might save the most lives through targeted interventions.
Climate change is a globe-spanning sociotechnical problem, a political quandary baked into humanity’s largest-scale engineering systems. Even when a government or technology has seemingly pushed the world forward, it can be unclear why the improvement happened, or whether, in the long run, it will make a meaningful difference. The Paris Agreement, after all, has been around for nearly a decade, the European Union’s cap-and-trade scheme for nearly two. Yet academics, experts, and politicians can (and do) disagree about whether either policy has ultimately helped — and even why they happened in the first place.
To resolve this problem, Giving Green reviews the historical record to identify philanthropic strategies that seem like they have a good shot of leading to emissions reductions. This year, it has focused on eight, including next-generation geothermal, decarbonizing aviation and marine shipping, advancing nuclear energy, and speeding the energy transition in low- and middle-income countries. Then it looks for groups that are working on those problems in time-proven ways. This year, it also started a grant fund so that it could support some of these groups itself.
I spoke with Daniel Stein, Giving Green’s director, earlier this week. Our interview has been edited and condensed for readability.
What is Giving Green’s goal with these recommendations?
The main goal — the problem we are trying to solve — is that we believe that there are lots of people who want to do something about climate, and there’s a lot of money that’s paralyzed by indecision and sits on the sidelines. So we provide a comprehensively researched guide with a systematic approach to try and determine where the high leverage points are in climate philanthropy — and by high-leverage, I’m thinking most greenhouse gas reductions per dollar.
We focus in on what we call philanthropic strategies, specific things that people could be doing. Then we find organizations working on those strategies that are doing a great job and promote them.
Can you tell me about a few of the organizations that you have chosen?
We have some that we’ve recommended for a few years, such as Clean Air Task Force. Last year, one of our big pushes was geothermal energy, and so we’ve recommended Project Innerspace, who are a big advocate for geothermal and work a lot with both private industry and the government.
Another big area of focus for us over the past few years has been heavy industry. The case for philanthropic support for heavy industry is really, really clear. Depending on what estimate you use, heavy industry accounts for roughly a quarter of carbon emissions, but something like less than 5% of philanthropic spending. There’s very little policy teeth almost anywhere in the world on industry, and basically nothing in the U.S., but there are pathways to solving it. We kind of know how to make green steel and green aluminum, and at least have ideas on concrete and plastic. There’s a lot nonprofits can do to pave the way forward in terms of: What does policy look like? How do we get from where we are today — where we kind of know the technology but no one’s using it — to a place where there’s actually supply and demand in the future? So our top recommendations for that is an organization called Industrious Labs in the U.S. and an organization called Future Cleantech Architects in Europe.
Over the past five years, I feel like I’ve seen your mission evolve and your strategies evolve. At the beginning, you recommended giving to a mix of high-end research and policy-development groups, and then also to more grassroots, movement-type groups. But over time, your set of recommendations have become much more focused on groups that are like CATF, that are providing nonpartisan, highly expert information and analysis.
I think that’s right, but it is not necessarily that we have just changed our mind on what works. I think different moments in time call for different approaches. And in those heady years leading up to the Inflation Reduction Act — where there was hope for a Democratic trifecta, and then it happened — there was a major opportunity for a left-driven, all-of-government push on climate. That was what we thought these grassroots groups were in a good position to push forward.
I think when you look back, you see groups like Sunrise having a really powerful influence. Obviously people disagree on what forces got the IRA to happen. But I really do think that you can draw a direct line from this progressive advocacy to the Democrats believing that they had to do something about climate to please their base.
But our view is that that moment has passed. Especially post-IRA, this opportunity for a more progressive-led legislative process has ended. Even if the Democrats were still in control, I think you weren’t going to get big bills like the IRA. We moved to a point where we need to focus on the wonky details of implementing these bills and then passing more technical, focused policy in the future. Our view is that in the U.S., the big opportunities have shifted to what we would call the “insider” groups. But I think that could change again, and it could change based on geography.
Are there any big climate strategies nobody is working on right now — where you identified a place where money could be spent, but you couldn’t find a nonprofit focused on it?
One of our high-level strategies is solar radiation management. That was something that was new for us this year. And within that, we would look at very specific substrategies. Should we be funding research? Should we be funding governance? And within those little sub-elements, we occasionally found stuff where we were like, wow, we really wish there was a group working on this, but we didn’t find anything.
But one of the nice things about having a [grant-making] fund this year, for the first time ever, is that we could help get things started that didn’t exist before. We’re super excited about industry, and so much industry is happening in developing countries. But when you ask, Who is focused on reducing steel emissions in Indonesia?, there were very few organizations. We made a grant to an organization called Climate Catalyst — they were already working on steel in India, and we helped them expand into emissions reduction in Indonesia.
I think some people might see your list and go, Wow, these are a bunch of high-end research and elite advocacy organizations, but what’s actually going to solve the climate crisis is local organizing.How would you reply to that?
I think that’s a reasonable point. We are open to all of these things, and we have considered them, and I think there is a time and place for grassroots approaches and activism. But looking at the historical research and our own research, I believe that the approaches that work on this are ones where the activism is tied to clear policy demands — that are good policies, that can have big, systematic decreases in emissions and seem to have some sort of feasible pathway to success.
What I’ve seen in a lot of grassroots movements in recent years are things like throwing soup at paintings, or blocking streets, which have not had this direct policy connection, and we are pretty skeptical of those approaches. But if grassroots approaches came on our radar that have a super viable theory of change to altering policy, we are very open.
This is the fifth year you’ve put out recommendations like this, right? What have you learned or changed your mind about during that time?
One of the things that’s really crystallized in our mind is that we really think the big levers are in systems. And that can mean a lot of things, but to us, it really means three things — it means policy, technology, and markets.
To solve the climate crisis, you need to change the rules of the game, such that everyday actors — people making decisions, businesses — everybody changes their behavior because some technology got cheaper, or some policy changed. We really use that to focus ourselves to think about, What are the big changes that need to happen, and how do we work backward to the actions that get us there?
So I think that might be why you see some of these more insider, techno-analysis-driven approaches. Because when you step back and you think, alright, we need this market to change in this way, or we need this technology to develop that doesn’t currently exist, and you think about how you get there, a lot of times you need advocacy to change policy, and you need research to make that policy change possible.
This year, Giving Green has recommended six top groups fighting climate change. They are:
On conditional loans, China’s emissions, and primary care clinics
Current conditions: Storm Conall brought more heavy rain and flooding to sodden England • Flash floods killed at least 20 people on Indonesia’s Sumatra island • The northern Plains will be hit with an “arctic outbreak” on Thanksgiving day.
The Department of Energy yesterday agreed to loan Rivian $6.6 billion to resume construction on its factory in Georgia, where the company will produce the upcoming R2 and R3 electric pickups. The loan is conditional, meaning it hasn’t been finalized just yet. “If finalized, the loan will support construction of a 9 million square foot facility to manufacture up to 400,000 mass-market electric sport utility vehicles and crossover vehicles,” the DOE said in a statement. “At full capacity, the EVs manufactured at the facility are expected to yield an annual fuel consumption savings of approximately 146 million gallons of petroleum.” Whether the loan will be completed before the incoming Trump administration takes over – or whether Trump would try to axe the loan – remains to be seen. The Biden administration set a goal for zero-emission vehicles to make up half of new U.S. car sales by 2030.
China’s CO2 emissions will rise slightly this year due to a surge in energy demand, according to new research published today from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “The growth in energy consumption and electricity consumption is faster than in the transition pathways,” the report said. Even as China rapidly rolls out renewables and EVs, emissions will rise by 0.4% in 2024. Less than half – 44% – of the experts polled by CREA said China’s emissions have already peaked, or will peak next year. Two years ago, just 15% of experts believed that to be the case. And 36% of experts said China’s coal consumption has peaked, up from 20% who said that last year. China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and coal is its main source of emissions.
Porsche this week joined a growing list of car manufacturers that are pumping the brakes on the shift to EVs. Instead of rolling out new EV models to accompany the luxury Taycan and Macan, Porsche now plans to produce new gas and hybrid models instead as it feels the effects of a slowdown in EV sales. “We are currently looking at the possibility of the originally planned all-electric vehicles having a hybrid drive or a combustion engine,” the company’s CFO said. “What is clear is that we are sticking with the combustion engine for much longer.” Earlier this year Porsche watered down its goal for 80% of sales to be electric by 2030.
Maine is suing oil giants Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Sunoco, and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing them of knowingly deceiving the public about the role of fossil fuels in the climate crisis. It becomes the ninth state to do so. The new lawsuit claims the oil companies have long known that fossil fuels cause climate change, and that the resulting rising sea levels are especially harmful in Maine because so many of the state’s communities and industries are located near the coastline. The state wants unspecified damages from the companies as well as funds for adaptation and mitigation.
A recent study published in the journal BMC Primary Care examines how climate change is affecting primary care clinics serving “low-income and socially disadvantaged communities.” Surveys were sent to more than 400 staff members at clinics across 43 states. Nearly 85% of the staffers who responded reported that climate change – and especially extreme heat – is affecting their patients’ health. Many said extreme weather events were harming their clinic’s ability to provide care due to effects like power outages and staff shortages. About 16% of respondents said extreme weather contributed to loss or spoilage of vaccines. But just one-third of respondents said they’d spoken to patients about the increasing health risks associated with climate change, saying they had more important topics to discuss in the limited amount of time available during consultations. And 61% cited their own lack of knowledge about the connection between climate change and health. Interestingly, just 34% said politics or polarization were stopping them from bringing up climate change when discussing health risks.
BMC Primary Care
Renewables accounted for 24% of electricity generation in the first three quarters of 2024, up from 22.8% in the same period last year.
Rob talks Ford and GM with BloombergNEF’s Corey Cantor. Plus, Rob and Jesse dig into the Trump transition.
It’s been a news-filled few weeks — so it’s time for a roundup. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about what Trump’s cabinet selections might mean for his climate policy and whether permitting reform could still happen. Then Rob chats with Corey Cantor, senior EV analyst at BloombergNEF, about promising Q3 sales for U.S. automakers, General Motors’ turnaround, and how much the Trump administration might dent America’s EV uptake.
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.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: How are you thinking about Ford and GM right now? Because they have basically totally reversed their position since the first time we started talking.
Corey Cantor: I hope I’m not too corny today, but I was thinking Missy Elliott — another New Jerseyan — “flip it and reverse it,” in terms of how people feel about Ford and GM. I think GM’s approach … don’t forget this is their second platform at the rodeo here, meaning GM had the Bolt and the Chevy Volt before it, and a good amount of experience with EVs. And really, what they were trying to do with Ultium was to build a battery and EV platform that could work with a variety of different vehicles.
And so the struggle, as we’ve outlined before, and many publications have outlined was they just couldn’t get the battery production working. They had issues with automation. They had issues with ensuring that they were setting up the necessary suppliers. And I’d say, about maybe nine months ago or so, a favorite EV journalist of mine, John Voelcker wrote in, I believe, InsideEVs, around this idea that GM had finally cracked Ultium and were finally kind of … He had got the head of Ultium at the time on record saying that they had resolved a lot of the issues, and really, you’ve seen it in the sales volume, as well as the fact that EVs like the Cadillac Lyric continue to sell pretty consistently.
Then GM ran into a software issue with the Blazer, and fixed that software issue, and that had slowed things down. And then since, really, June of this year has been off to the races. And so we’ll see how the fourth quarter goes, right? I think you don’t want to get too high on any kind of automaker, but GM is clearly in a better spot because they’re approaching making a profit on each of the EVs sold.
Now, I’ll caveat that with, we don’t know if the EV tax credit itself, you know, at the federal level, plays a role in the fact that they’ll be gross margin profitable, but that is a pretty big turning point. Because at that point, you’re no longer losing money on those EVs, and so you are kind of geared to go more high-volume. Where if you look at Ford, Ford has been losing thousands of dollars on every electric vehicle, really had not been building a platform for the current sales of the Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning, hoping to kind of just price them where they’d be losing little enough on each that they can make their bridge to that next platform.
And then earlier this fall, Ford basically announced pushing back those EV models to 2027, along with the new platform. So Ford kind of runs into the issue that we discussed on the previous conversation with Tesla, in that they’re going to have only really two EVs in the U.S. market for the next couple of years. So GM will have the Bolt back next year and some other Cadillacs. There’s a lot of exciting things on the way for GM.
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.