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:
Current conditions: A storm lurking off the coast of Australia could soon become a tropical cyclone • Bangkok's 11 million workers have been told to stay home today to avoid harmful air pollution • Washington, D.C., could see up to four inches of snow this weekend – or none at all.
Car sellers sold more than 25,000 tax credit-eligible electric vehicles between January 1 and February 6, according to new Treasury data. That’s an average of more than 675 EVs sold at a government-sponsored discount per day, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo calculated. To put that in perspective, about 1.08 million cars were sold in total in the month of January, according to Cox Automotive, or about 34,840 per day. So the tax credit-supported EVs were only about 2% of the total cars sold. But 25,000 discounted EVs is nothing to scoff at considering that fewer models are eligible now than last year. Also, the Treasury said it has paid approximately $135 million in advance payments to dealers for about 19,000 of the EVs sold this year. “So even with fewer options available, buyers are still taking advantage of the new instant rebate and finding vehicles that work for them,” Pontecorvo said.
The Department of Energy (DoE) yesterday announced it was making an additional $63 million available to speed up the adoption of residential heat pumps across the country. This is on top of the $169 million in federal funding announced in November of last year. The goal is to boost manufacturing of heat pump systems, but with this new influx of cash, it seems the DoE also wants to wake Americans up to the benefits of using a heat pump to heat and cool water. Its announcement notes that heat pump water heaters can be up to three times more energy efficient than conventional water heaters. “Basically, the federal funding is aiming to nix the use of gas in a home wherever possible,” wrote Matt Simon at Wired. Ali Zaidi, assistant to the president and national climate adviser, told Simon that “we’re really seeing, I think, a sea change across the country in terms of how people heat and cool their homes.” Data shows that in 2023, heat pumps outsold furnaces for the second year in a row.
Google is teaming up with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to help track methane emissions from space. The MethaneSAT – a satellite developed specifically to monitor methane emissions – will launch into orbit next month. Google will use artificial intelligence to create a map of oil and gas infrastructure locations across the world. “Once we have that map, then we can overlay methane data,” said Yael Maguire, head of Google’s Geo Sustainability team. This will offer a “far better understanding of the types of machinery that contributes most to methane leaks.”
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that’s far more warming than carbon dioxide. But it breaks down in the atmosphere more quickly that CO2, so slashing it is seen as “one of the cheapest, fastest ways to curb global warming in the short term,” explainedBloomberg. Fossil fuel operations tend to dramatically underreport their methane releases, so the hope is that more transparency about emissions will encourage reduction efforts from producers, but reductions “can increase costs in the short term and slow output,” Bloomberg noted.
India wants to take its relationship with one of the world’s leading energy authorities to the next level. The country has applied to become a full member of the International Energy Agency (IEA), joining 31 other member countries, and ministers are deciding whether or not to say yes. India is already an “association country,” but full membership would boost its role in tackling climate change. It could also help the IEA “strengthen cooperation in Asia to stabilize energy supplies,” as the region emerges as a key source of new global energy consumption, The Nikkeireported. The IEA noted that energy demand is expected to grow more in India than in any other country over the next 30 years. “The world cannot plan for its energy future without India at the table,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.
The latest development in the enduring quest to create a meat substitute that people will actually eat is “beef rice.” Yes, you read that right. Researchers in South Korea have grown rice grains in a lab that contain cow muscle and fat cells. The beef rice is pink, firm, and high in protein and fat. Unlike some other meat alternatives, it uses ingredients that are widely available, affordable, and have a lower carbon footprint per gram of protein than beef, leading its creators to declare it “a novel food ingredient that can overcome humanity’s food crisis.” But the proof will be in the (rice) pudding: “A critical test is around public appetite for these sorts of lab-developed foods,” Neil Ward, an agri-food and climate specialist and professor at the University of East Anglia, told CNN.
America’s 16,000 golf courses soak up 1.5 billion gallons of water per day.
Editor's note: This article has been changed to correct the number of EVs Americans are buying each day.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
The Fed on Wednesday issued a report showing substantial increases in the price of eggs, used cars, and auto insurance — data that could spell bad news for the renewables economy.
Though some of those factors had already been widely reported on, the overall rise in prices exceeded analysts’ expectations. With overall inflation still elevated — reaching an annual rate of 3%, while “core” inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose to 3.3%, after an unexpectedly sharp 0.4% jump in January alone — any prospect of substantial interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve has dwindled even further.
Renewable energy development is especially sensitive to higher interest rates. That’s because renewables projects, like wind turbines and solar panels, have to incur the overwhelming majority of their lifetime costs before they start operating and generating revenue. Developers then often fund much of the project through borrowed money that’s secured against an agreement to buy the resulting power. When the cost of borrowing money goes up, projects become less viable, with lower prospective returns sometimes causing investors not to go forward .
High interest rates have plagued the renewables economy for years. “As interest rates rise, all of a sudden, solar assets that are effectively bonds become less valuable,” Quinn Pasloske, a managing director at Greenbacker, a renewable investor and operating company, told me on Tuesday, describing how the stream of payments from a solar project becomes less valuable as rates rise because investors can get more from risk-free government bonds.
The new inflation data is “consistent with our call of an extended Fed pause, with only one rate cut in 2025, happening in June,” Morgan Stanley economists wrote in a note to clients. Bond traders are also projecting just a single cut for the rest of the year — but not until December.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking committee Tuesday, “We think our policy rate is in a good place, and we don’t see any reason to be in a hurry to reduce it further.”
The yield for the 10-year Treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of credit, is up 0.09% today, to 4.63%. While this is below where yields peaked in mid-January, it’s a level still well above where yields have been for almost all of the last year. When Treasury yields rise, the cost of credit throughout the economy goes up.
Clean energy stocks were down this morning — but so is the overall market. Because while high interest rates are especially bad for renewables, they’re not exactly great for anyone else.
Current conditions: Los Angeles is bracing for a massive rain storm that could trigger landslides in areas recently charred by severe wildfires • About 90% of districts in India have received little or no rainfall since the start of the year • Schools are closed in Kansas City, Missouri, where up to 6 inches of snow is expected today.
California’s state-backed insurance plan of last resort is short on funds to pay out claims from the Los Angeles wildfires. As a result, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is asking private insurers that operate in the state to give the program, known as the FAIR Plan, $1 billion. The FAIR Plan is for people who can’t get private insurance coverage because their properties are considered high risk. As weather disasters get worse and private insurers pull back from the state, more people are relying on the FAIR Plan, and its policy load has doubled since 2020 to more than 452,000. The plan has received some 4,700 claims related to last month’s devastating fires, and paid out more than $914 million. But that’s not enough. The program expects a loss of $4 billion from the fires. This is the first time in 30 years that the program has needed to ask for more money. The fee will be divided between the private companies according to market share, and they’ll have 30 days to pay. Up to half of the cost can be passed on to their own policyholders. Even so, there are concerns that this will push private insurers to leave California to avoid further losses, exacerbating the state’s insurance crisis. State Farm, the state’s largest insurer, recently asked regulators to approve a 22% rate increase.
The U.S. added nearly 50% more clean energy capacity last year than in 2023, according to a new report from energy data company Cleanview. Most of the 48.2 gigawatts of new capacity came in the form of batteries and solar, with solar additions rising by 65%, mostly in southern states like Texas and Florida. As for battery storage, four states (California, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada) accounted for 70% of new capacity. Meanwhile, wind power missed out on growth, with capacity additions dropping by nearly a quarter year-over-year. The report says solar growth will likely slow down in 2025, battery storage could grow by nearly 70%, and wind capacity could grow by 80% if all planned projects manage to reach completion. One interesting tidbit is that Indiana is emerging as a solar hot spot. It ranks third on the list of states with the most solar additions planned for 2025, below Texas and California, but above Arizona. Of course, a lot will depend on the Trump administration.
Cleanview
Global air traffic rose by 10% to an all-time high last year, according to recent data from the International Air Transport Association. This means more aviation pollution. Air travel already accounts for 2.5% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, and has contributed an estimated 4% to global warming. As Ben Elgin at Bloombergnoted, the rise in air travel comes as airlines fail to adopt “sustainable” aviation fuel at meaningful levels, with SAF accounting for a paltry 0.3% of commercial jet fuel production in 2024. “SAF volumes are increasing, but disappointingly slowly,” the IATA said in December. “Governments are sending mixed signals to oil companies which continue to receive subsidies for their exploration and production of fossil oil and gas.” Airlines are relying on SAF to curb their emissions, with many pledging to consume 10% SAF by 2030. But “even if airlines can somehow replace 10% of their fuel with lower-emitting alternatives by the end of the decade, those climate benefits would be wiped out by the industry’s expected growth,” wrote Elgin. Yesterday the Trump administration released a $782 million loan for a plant in Montana to turn waste fats into biofuel. The loan was originally finalized under the Biden administration.
The CEO of Ford Motor yesterday warned that the company could be forced to lay off workers if President Trump raises tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and guts Biden-era legislation that supported electric vehicle production. “A 25% tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Jim Farley said at a conference. He added that ending loans and subsidies for EV manufacturing projects would also put many Ford jobs at risk. The New York Times noted that his comments “offered a rare example of a corporate executive calling into question Mr. Trump’s policies or statements.”
Sales of electric vehicles were up 18% in January compared to the same time in 2024, but growth is slowing, according to research firm Rho Motion. Last month, 1.3 million EVs were sold worldwide. That’s down 35% from December’s numbers, and marks the third month in a row of slowing growth. China’s sales were down last month because of the Chinese New Year. Meanwhile, sales were up in Europe as new emissions standards came into effect. And in the U.S. and Canada, sales rose 22%. Rho Motion expects more than 20 million EVs will be sold this year.
$160 million – The amount raised in a Series B funding round by Chestnut Carbon. The startup focuses on planting trees and vegetation, and improving forest management practices to better remove carbon from the atmosphere. Chestnut will use this latest funding to build out afforestation projects — that is, planting trees in areas where, at least in modern times, forests have not existed.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the nature of the Trump administration’s actions on funding for a Montana biofuels plant.
Chestnut Carbon announces a major new funding round on the heels of its deal with Microsoft.
The embattled nature-based carbon removal market got a significant show of support today as Chestnut Carbon announced a whopping $160 million Series B funding round, led by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The startup focuses on planting trees and vegetation as well as on improving forest management practices to better remove carbon from the atmosphere.
This announcement comes on the heels of the company’s recent deal with Microsoft to remove over 7 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over a 25-year period. That involves planting about 35 million native trees over about 60,000 acres. It’s Microsoft’s largest carbon removal contract in the U.S., and one of the largest domestic carbon removal projects period — including those that rely on engineered solutions such as direct air capture.
Chestnut aims to fill a void in the forest carbon removal space by employing a rigorous measurement, reporting, and verification framework that it claims leaves little room for accounting errors and greenwashing, offering a solution that, hopefully, the market can finally trust. So far it seems, investors are buying it.
Chestnut will use this latest funding to build out afforestation projects — that is, planting trees in areas where, at least in modern times, forests have not existed. “We’re buying this farmland — this is marginal pasture land — and we are turning that back into a native forest,” Chestnut’s chief financial officer, Greg Adams, told me. The company buys land that is ill-suited for farming due to factors such as acidic, alkaline, or nutrient-poor soil or a climate that’s hostile to food crops but works for certain tree species.
The startup began planting native tree species in Arkansas and Alabama in 2022, and has since expanded into Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. There are a number of benefits to planting in the Southeast, Adams told me. For one, the region’s climate allows trees to grow particularly fast, leading to more immediate carbon benefits. Also, the area isn’t very wildfire-prone, but is extremely biodiverse — so if one species of tree falls victim to disease or blight, much of the forest is likely to remain unscathed. “We look to build a forest that, if you had a time machine and you went back 100 years, would look very similar to what was there 100 years ago,” Adams told me.
While planting trees isn’t particularly expensive, land acquisition is, and that’s what the majority of Chestnut’s Series B funding will go towards. Adams told me that owning the land also helps to “reinforce the permanent nature” of Chestnut’s carbon removals, since the company has 100% control over land management decisions.
Forest-based carbon offsets are famously prone to fraud and other accounting improprieties. A 2023 investigation showed that many rainforest carbon credits approved by Verra, a leading credit certifier, for instance, were essentially bogus.
Chestnut is well aware that past scandals have eroded trust in nature-based removal efforts and aims to counteract the industry’s dubious reputation. While Verra does certify Chestnut Carbon’s “improved forest management” credits, another entity called Gold Standard certifies the company’s afforestation credits.
In addition to aligning with Gold Standard’s methodology, Adams told me the team uses a number of tools to verify the amount of carbon that its trees remove, including one that the company invented itself, which has plotted every parcel of land in the lower 48 states. This tool uses public and private data to inform Chestnut whether a plot of land is suitable for afforestation. Then, given a hypothetical mix of trees and their space relative to each other, an algorithm determines how much CO2 they would capture and sequester over a 50-year period. After the digital work is done, foresters visit the proposed site and develop a more nuanced analysis that takes into account factors such as expected yield over a given period of time and various mortality risks.
“We sell carbon credits, but we ultimately sell reputational risk insurance, because these are voluntary,” Adams told me, saying he recognizes the fragile nature of the market at this stage. “I want to make sure that what we do is seen differently, in a positive way, and ultimately it’s not going to blow back in our customers’ faces.”