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Extreme heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States. It's also one of the easiest to underestimate: We feel it on our skin, or perhaps see it shimmering in the air around us, but it doesn't announce itself with the destructive aplomb of a hurricane or wildfire. Still, heat waves are becoming practically synonymous with summer.
Climate change is only making heat waves worse. They're getting more frequent, up from an average of two per year in the United States in the 1960s to six per year in the 2010s and '20s. They're also about a day longer than they were in the ‘60s, and they're more intense; those two factors combined, in particular, make them more deadly. This year's expected El Niño will bring even more heat with it: NOAA's summer outlook for the United States, shown below, paints a swath of above-average temperatures across much of the country.
NOAA's seasonal temperature outlook for the summer of 2023.National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to cover heat waves. Each is unique — suffering of any kind is always unique, even if the broad strokes are not — yet the things one can say about them are, for the most part, largely the same. Records will break, power grids will strain, and people will be hurt: This is the reality of climate change.
So this year, we are trying an experiment: We will document particularly notable heat waves around the world as they happen, but rather than devote separate stories to them, each heat wave will get a short entry within this larger page. We will call out especially vivid details or statistics and include links to local outlets that can provide more information to anyone looking for it.
The goal here is to create a record of the very real impact of climate change today. By the end of the summer, this page will likely be filled with entry after entry showcasing the ways heat affected people around the world over the course of a few months. This is, I am aware, potentially fertile ground for climate anxiety, but our hope is that the project can help us recognize how our lives are changing and allow us to refocus on what we can do to adapt to our new reality.
Each entry has its own URL. If you wish to share details of any particular heat wave, simply scroll to that entry and hit the share button on your phone or copy the link in your browser. If you'd like to share this tracker as a whole, scroll back up to this introduction. This timeline will be in reverse chronological order, or in other words the newest events will appear at the top of the page.
This project is publishing in the midst of a heat wave hitting multiple Asian countries, and we’ve also included a couple of heat waves that have already come and gone; as the summer progresses, you'll see updates from the entire Heatmap staff and the gradual shaping of a larger story of heat. Again, this is an experiment, and we'd love to hear what you think about it — if you have strong thoughts one way or another, please send them to neel [at] heatmap [dot] news. —Neel Dhanesha
September 6: As we near the end of the summer — though ambient temperatures this week may suggest otherwise — the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has announced that Earth just had its hottest three-month period on record, and the year so far is the second-warmest after 2016, which saw an extreme El Niño.
“Climate breakdown has begun,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement. “Leaders must turn up the heat now for climate solutions. We can still avoid the worst of climate chaos — and we don’t have a moment to lose.”
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, August is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average. Last month saw the highest global average sea surface temperatures on record, at 20.98°C, and Antarctic sea ice was at a record low for that point in the year. Those sea surface temperatures will have a significant impact on hurricane season; as we saw with Idalia, extremely high ocean temperatures can supercharge tropical storms.
These numbers are no surprise — scientists have, of course, been warning of these catastrophic impacts for years — and this report is just the latest in a long line of UN reports that catalog the ways our planet is changing. The question, as always, is if this report will spur any more action than the previous ones did, or whether it will amount to yet another howl lost in the wind. —Neel Dhanesha
August 23-28: On Thursday, record-breaking heat tied the hottest temperature ever recorded in Houston at 109 degrees. In Dallas on Friday, highs climbed into the high 100s. And in Austin on Sunday, the temperature climbed up to 109 degrees. From Thursday to Sunday, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas issued a conservation request every day — asking Texans to lower their energy use as air conditioners blasted.
Texans will get a relative reprieve from the heat over the coming days: Dallas won’t cross back over the triple-digit mark until Saturday, while Houston won’t get hotter than 100 degrees this week. Still, temperatures remain high — a reminder that just because summer break is over in many places, summer weather isn’t, making air conditioning in schools and on buses more critical than ever. —Will Kubzansky
August 22: The Midwest joins the South and Southwest this week in pulling the short straw of weather forecasts. The National Weather Service projects a large heat dome will “persist in at least 22 states until the end of the week,” Axios reports, affecting 143 million Americans. Numerous cities are experiencing heat indexes between 110 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit; Lawrence, Kansas, even reached a “feels-like” temperature of 134 on Sunday.
Not only will the extreme highs endanger lives, the heat waves might threaten “a bumper U.S. harvest that’s key to keeping global inflation in check,” Bloomberg reports. The United States expects to reap its second largest corn harvest on record this year, but the upcoming heat might dry out fields that are already showing signs of being parched.
Over the weekend, relief for the Midwest will come from cooler winds flowing down from Canada, AccuWeather reports. Unfortunately, the welcome breeze might also come along with “bouts of poor air quality” and smoke from Canadian wildfires. —Annie Xia
August 16: With triple-digit highs, the Pacific Northwest has joined the ranks of states breaking heat records this summer. Portland, Oregon, hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, a record for the month of August. Seattle, Washington, also set a new daily record on Monday when it reached 96 degrees.
Combined with strong winds and moderate to severe drought levels, high temperatures in the region also mean heightened wildfire risk. Almost 3,000 firefighters are already “battling the seven large fires burning across Oregon and Washington,” CNN reports.
The sweltering temperatures continue a streak of oppressive summers in the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Steven Mitchell, medical director of a Seattle hospital’s emergency department, told The New York Times that “he couldn’t remember treating a single case of severe heat illness or heat stroke” before 2021, when a deadly heat wave struck the region. —Annie Xia
August 9-11: Florida is often synonymous with heat, but the heat index in Tampa Bay climbed up to 112 degrees on Wednesday — flirting with 113, the mark at which an excessive heat warning is issued. The Tampa Bay Times reported that the warning issued Wednesday was possibly the area’s first excessive heat warning ever, with the caveat that records might be faulty.
While the heat has let up slightly, a heat advisory remains in effect from Fort Myers up to Chiefland, and the area has exceeded its electricity demand records twice this week. On Friday, the heat index at Tampa International Airport reached 110 degrees, and values are expected to climb up to 108 on Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. —Will Kubzansky
August 7: In places like New Orleans, the old adage applies: It’s not just the heat, it’s the humidity. The high is set to hover between 100 and 97 through Friday, but the heat index will sit between 116 and 111. Louisiana, like much of the country, is seeing an unusually hot summer: Baton Rouge experienced its warmest month on record in July. All the while, central Mississippi is experiencing highs between the high 90s and low 100s, with heat indices reaching 120 degrees, according to the National Weather Service’s outpost in Jackson.
The heat killed 16 Louisianans in June and July. And given that extreme heat causes the worst impacts for people experiencing poverty and creates particularly devastating effects for Black Americans, it’s worth noting that Mississippi and Louisiana have the two highest poverty rates in the country as well as the highest proportion of Black residents of any two states. —Will Kubzansky
August 2: Iran is shutting down. The New York Times reports that government agencies, banks, schools, soccer leagues are all closed Wednesday and Thursday, allegedly due to the heat, which is expected to reach 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Tehran. In Ahvaz, a southwestern city, the high on Wednesday is a blistering 123 degrees.
Per the Times, some Iranians have expressed doubts about the alleged reason for the shutdown — instead claiming that the country’s electric grid can’t meet demand. All the while, Iran faces extensive water shortages across the country, largely due to mismanagement of its resources. —Will Kubzansky
August 2: A deadly heat wave is striking both sides of the Sea of Japan.
In South Korea, two deaths were reported on Tuesday due to high heat — they were senior citizens working outside — bringing the death toll from the heat wave to 12. With temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Yeoju, a city south of Seoul, the country has raised its warning system for heat to the highest level, the first instance since 2019.
And in Japan, a 13-year-old girl and an elderly couple died due to heat-related causes on Friday. Temperatures have climbed above 103 degrees this week in parts of the country, and 32 prefectures are under the government’s “special heatstroke alert,” according to The Washington Post.
Japan is coming off a brutal month of July, which included the longest run of 95 degree temperatures in Tokyo since records began in 1875. Heat waves are especially devastating for Japan, which has one of the world’s oldest populations. —Will Kubzansky
July 28: No American city has been more emblematic of this summer’s relentless heat than Phoenix, where the temperature has climbed above 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 29 consecutive days. That streak looks like it might finally come to a close, with highs ranging from 106 to 109 from Monday to Wednesday next week as the forecast calls for rain over the weekend. But by Thursday, the mercury will climb above 110 yet again.
With the heat showing no signs of truly relenting, Arizona Democrats have proposed a novel solution — calling on President Joe Biden to issue a presidential disaster declaration for extreme heat, unlocking the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response capabilities. And all the while, more than 30 wildfires are blazing across the state of Arizona. —Will Kubzansky
July 26: For most of the summer, stories about extreme heat in the U.S. have been limited to the South and Southwest. That’s changed in the last few days, as heat is forecast to scorch the Midwest and Northeast this week. On Thursday, New York will see highs in the mid-90s and D.C. up to 99 — both with heat indexes in the mid-100s. In Kansas City, highs will sit in the 100s through Friday and climb back up into the triple digits again on Monday; Indianapolis will reach 99 degrees Friday.
Late July is an appropriate time for heat waves — and this burst does not look like a lengthy one, with the 10-day forecast dipping back into the 80s — but it’s also worth noting that cities like D.C. are less prepared for extreme heat than Miami or Phoenix. D.C. has entered a hot weather emergency, but in New York, some advocates have cautioned that the city is not ready for the challenges ahead. —Will Kubzansky
July 26: Devastating consequences of the climate crisis are playing out in Algeria, Greece, Italy, and Tunisia, as wildfires spread and take dozens of lives — more than 40 in total and 34 in Algeria alone. The wildfires are being driven in part by intense heat, up to 119.7 degrees Fahrenheit in Algeria and 120 degrees in Tunisia. While those temperatures have cooled slightly, they will reach up to 111 degrees in Tunis come Friday and already climbed into the triple digits in Greece on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Greek authorities have evacuated more than 20,000 people from Rhodes, a popular vacation spot. —Will Kubzansky
July 25: The summer has offered a deluge of heat headlines — scrolling through this page is the proof. But zooming out, the context matters: Has this summer’s heat been uniquely driven by climate change? The answer is almost certainly yes, according to a study from researchers at Imperial College London, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
The flash study is not peer-reviewed — it moved too quickly to go through that process — but it notes that “without human-induced climate change these heat events would … have been extremely rare.” The high temperatures in North America and Europe, it adds, would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. Heat waves may have still occurred, but the key is the intensity: In the U.S., Europe, and China, climate change accounted for between 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of additional heat. —Will Kubzansky
July 17: Records are falling left and right in the Southwest. At 118 degrees Fahrenheit, Phoenix broke its all time high temperature record on Saturday. The city is also approaching breaking its record for the most 110 degree days in a row. In El Paso, the temperature at the airport has hit 100 degrees for 32 consecutive days, the longest streak ever. And according to The New York Times, the National Weather Service called for 45 record highs across the U.S. last weekend.
And as wildfires burn in Southern California, the heat wave is showing no signs of letting up. Phoenix will see highs in the 110s through Monday, as will Las Vegas. At this point, the heat wave has been classified as another heat dome, and Texas is feeling the brunt of it too, with San Antonio and Austin under excessive heat warnings. The heat wave is most dangerous for vulnerable members of society, especially people who are homeless and seniors — placing an outsized and crucial burden on cooling centers in the Southwest. —Will Kubzansky
July 14: A year after Europe saw 60,000 excess deaths due to heat waves, according to a study published by the scientific journal Nature Medicine, Southern Europe is scorching again. In Greece, the Acropolis closed midday Friday to tourists with high temperatures in Athens expected to reach 104 degrees. Parts of Spain saw temperatures going up to 113 degrees Monday, and another heat wave is expected to arrive Sunday. Italy, in the meantime, is expecting that next week could break the record for the highest temperatures ever recorded on the continent.
Europe has taken a new approach to heat waves — giving them names like hurricanes in an effort to raise awareness about their severity, an idea my colleague Neel Dhanesha wrote about last year. The first round of heat this week was dubbed Cerberus; the second round set to arrive this weekend is named Charon. —Will Kubzansky
Grant Faint/Image Bank via Getty Images
July 12: In a summer full of record-breaking heat, the fact that it’s hot in Death Valley is almost comforting. On Sunday, the national park in the Mojave Desert, known for being the hottest place on Earth, is projected by the National Weather Service to reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit, which would probably tie the record for the world’s highest temperature. The uncertainty stems from some controversy surrounding the record: While the valley was said to have reached temperatures of 134 degrees in 1913, experts have questioned the legitimacy of that reading. That leaves 130 degree days in 2020 and 2021 as the hottest temperatures on record — in Death Valley or anywhere.
While Death Valley’s heat is something of a novelty, it has catastrophic impacts elsewhere. Las Vegas’s high will only be 12 degrees cooler (118 degrees), and temperatures will reach 106 degrees on the same day in San Bernardino. —Will Kubzansky
July 10: After 10 days with high temperatures above 110 degrees, the highs in Phoenix are forecasted to eclipse that mark for at least the next nine days. According to the National Weather Service’s Phoenix office, the record for consecutive 110-degree days is 18; the office is placing the probability that the record gets shattered at 50%. And like Texas’ heat dome earlier this summer, evening temperatures aren’t declining as substantially as they usually do, leaving Arizonans without relief.
In New Mexico, the National Weather Service office out of Albuquerque is describing the week ahead as “near-record heat.” And temperatures in Las Vegas, Nevada, are set to get even more brutal over the course of the week, with the high going from 107 degrees on Monday to a forecasted high of 117 on Sunday. The heat will also lead to brutal temperatures in Death Valley — potentially up to 127 degrees on Sunday — according to the The Washington Post. —Will Kubzansky
July 10: Texas can’t catch a break this summer — and the South is catching yet another heat wave as well. Heat indexes in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Miami are set to reach 107 to 108 degrees this week. Water temperatures around South Florida are well above average, and the chance that rain breaks the heat in the area is limited over the next few days. This year is already the hottest on record in Miami, according to WLRN. —Will Kubzansky
July 7: Phoenix and Tuscon are under excessive heat warnings for at least the next six days. Afternoon highs are projected to reach between 105 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit — Friday will get up to 112 degrees in Phoenix — bringing temperatures above average for early July, according to AZCentral.
It might last well into the month. According to the National Weather System’s warning: “We are still anticipating this current heat wave to continue through next week and likely beyond with it rivaling some of the worst heat waves this area has ever seen.” A big heat wave also brings pressure to the electric grid, particularly in heavily populated areas like Phoenix, as residents crank up their ACs. One study from earlier this year showed that a five-day heat wave and blackout would combine to send more than 50% of the city’s population to the emergency room.
It’s also not just Arizona that will catch the worst of this wave: New Mexico, Las Vegas and Death Valley all have scorching temperatures in store over the next week, The Washington Post notes. —Will Kubzansky
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July 6:Outdoor work came to a halt in Beijing as temperatures reached 104 degrees Thursday in the Chinese capital. A heat wave is gripping parts of China, including the capital and the nearby Henan province. Before 2023, Beijing had experienced temperatures above 104 degrees six times, CNN reported. This year alone, the temperature has eclipsed that mark on five days. In Taiwan, temperatures are set to reach 104 degrees Saturday, according to the country’s Central Weather Bureau. All the while, flooding has also led to devastation in China, causing 15 deaths in Chongqing, Hunan province, and elsewhere. —Will Kubzansky
June 30 - July 5: In the Antelope Valley and Santa Clarita Valley, temperatures reached 105 and 101 degrees respectively Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported. David Gomberg, an NWS forecaster, told the Times that high heat is to be expected in Southern California around now — to some extent, the weather is “routine,” he said.
Still, temperatures climbed rapidly in the Los Angeles area beginning Friday, especially inland and in the desert. And because the rise came so suddenly following a temperate period, it may have posed an unusually high risk to Californians who hadn’t yet acclimated to the season’s hotter temperatures. Extreme heat can also create arid conditions begetting wildfires, though no reports of serious fires in California have emerged following July 4 fireworks displays. —Will Kubzansky
July 5: This year’s Fourth of July was the world’s hottest day on record, and that record will likely be broken again this summer. In Texas, the heat was nothing new: The last day El Paso recorded a high temperature under 100 degrees was June 15. Since then, every day has gotten up to the triple digits — with the heat reaching 108 degrees on June 26 and 27.
In other words, it’s still really, really hot in Texas as a heat dome remains firmly planted over the state. Some parts of Texas have seen a handful of cooler days — July 4 wasn’t quite as brutal in Houston, for instance, and San Antonio’s temperatures have largely fallen back into the ‘90s. But the southern part of the state is in what the San Antonio Express-News describes as a “rut”: Heat is giving way to marginally cooler temperatures but the weather is expected to get hotter and more humid again.
For older people or people who work outdoors, the sustained heat has proven especially deadly. The vast majority of Texas’s prisoners, meanwhile, are without air conditioning. —Will Kubzansky
The North Atlantic Ocean is in the middle of a startling heat wave that could have far-reaching repercussions.
The weeks-long marine heat wave broke records for the months of May and is expected to do the same in June. Sea surface temperatures around the U.K. and northern Europe are an astonishing 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average in places, The Washington Post reports.
“Totally unprecedented,” Richard Unsworth, a biosciences professor at the U.K.’s Swansea University, told CNN. It’s “way beyond the worst-case predictions for the changing climate of the region.” Scientists say the warming oceans could have significant consequences, from harming marine life to decreasing the sea’s capacity to absorb pollution.
Above-average heat has also hit the U.K. Temperatures are expected to hit 89 degrees Fahrenheit in southeast England over the weekend.
As a flotilla in the Atlantic searched for the missing Titan submersible, the prominent environmental writer Bill McKibben tweeted, “The truly terrifying news this week is not what happened deep beneath the sea, it’s what’s going on at the surface.” —Annie Xia
June 22: Texans will only get a brief reprieve from the most extreme highs of their heat wave before temperatures pick back up early next week. Notably, temperatures aren’t falling considerably at night, making the heat even more dangerous. North Texas will see the mercury rise up to 104 degrees through Thursday, with the small caveat that humidity will decline into a more comfortable range as the week goes on. In parts of Southwest Texas, the heat won’t let up at all: the high temperatures in Del Rio will hover between 107 and 110 through next Wednesday.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas issued its first voluntary conservation notice of the heat wave this past Tuesday. While the utility was able to meet demand, it requested that all Texans, especially government agencies, reduce their electricity use.
Mexico is similarly seeing scorching temperatures, which have led to eight deaths already. And high heat in the Rio Grande Valley means that migrants who traverse the border in Southwest Texas could be left exposed to the same high heat, which can have deadly consequences. —Will Kubzansky
Week of June 19: Temperatures in the northern Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, two of the most populous in the country, reached as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius), CNN reports. The extreme heat triggered power cuts, leaving people without running water, fans, or air conditioners.
The Associated Pressreports nearly 170 people had died as of June 20, overwhelming hospitals, morgues, and crematoria — although state officials dispute the connection to the heat wave. Nearly half of the deaths came from a single district, Ballia, in Uttar Pradesh; officials say they have opened an investigation into the cause, which they say could be linked to contaminated water. Members of opposition parties blame the state government and its chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, for not investing enough in medical facilities or warning residents about the heat wave ahead of time. —Neel Dhanesha
June 19: The numbers from Texas’ heat wave are already striking: Dallas tied a humidity record on Thursday, and tens of millions of Texans woke up Friday to heat advisories or warnings. Temperatures will approach — and possibly break — records in Austin early next week, with highs between 104 and 106 through Wednesday. In the area, the heat indices will be highest over the Rio Grande plains and coastal plains, according to the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio office.
Houston, in the meantime, saw its first excessive heat warning since 2016, with heat indices potentially breaking 115 degrees Friday and Saturday. Texas’ grid has held up (so far) — though the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has projected that next week will shatter the record levels of electricity demand that were just set this week, thanks to the number of air conditioners expected to be on full blast. —Will Kubzansky
June 14: Triple-digit heat has arrived early in Texas. Large parts of central and southeast Texas saw the heat index climb into the 100s Wednesday, topping out in McAllen at a searing 118. The heat wave is expected to spread and last through the week, hitting San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Austin, where it will feel like 112 degrees Thursday.
But while meteorologists watch for record heat and humidity, others will keep their eye on the state’s isolated electricity grid. Its operators, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, warned of record-breaking electricity use Friday, an ominous signal for a state that has struggled with deadly blackouts in recent years. But this is just Texas’s first test of the summer: The grid operators noted that the record-breaking demand will likely be surpassed later in the summer. —Will Kubzansky
June 7-11: As skies over New York and Washington, D.C., turned orange from wildfire smoke, Puerto Rico and nearby Caribbean nations sweltered under a heat dome. The Heat Index, which takes into account both heat and humidity, went as high as 125 degrees in parts of Puerto Rico — a number that Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist at Tampa Bay’s WFLA-TV, said was astonishing. Temperature records broke across the island.
The Puerto Rican power grid still hasn’t recovered after Hurricane Maria hit the island in 2017, and over 100,000 Puerto Ricans reportedly lost power (though, as Pearl Marvell pointed out in Yale Climate Connections, the exact number cannot be verified because the island’s power company asked PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages, to stop collecting data on Puerto Rico until it can “replace their technology and provide more accurate data”). As I wrote in May, the combination of extreme heat and blackouts has the potential to be incredibly deadly, though no deaths were reported from this heat dome as of publication. —Neel Dhanesha
June 5: Large parts of China have seen record-breaking heat over the past month, one year after the worst heat wave and drought in decades hit the country. This year, Yunnan and Sichuan provinces saw temperatures exceed 40° C (104° F); according to CNN, heat in some parts of the country was so bad that pigs and rabbits died on farms and carp being raised in rice fields "burned to death" as water temperatures rose. Henan province had the opposite problem; extreme rain flooded wheat fields there, ruining crops in the country's largest wheat-growing region.
Meanwhile, a prolonged heat wave in Vietnam is keeping temperatures between 26 and 38 degrees Celsius (78.8 and 100.4° F), prompting officials to turn off street lights and ask citizens to cut down on their power consumption to avoid blackouts. VNExpress reports that many Vietnamese citizens who can't afford air conditioners are seeking respite in public spaces like libraries, buses, department stores, and cafes. —Neel Dhanesha
May 12: Some 12 million people in Washington and Oregon were under a heat advisory for four days starting May 12 as temperatures in the region topped out at more than 20 degrees above the normal high at that time of year, which should have been in the mid-60s.
"It’s harder for people in the Pacific Northwest to cool down when it’s 90 out than for people in, say, Phoenix or Las Vegas — cities that were constructed with heat in mind," wrote Heatmap Founding Staff Writer and Washington native Jeva Lange in her larger story about this heat wave. "Seattle, for example, is the second-least-air-conditioned metro area in the country (behind only “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in” San Francisco). Just over half of the homes in the area have a/c, and many of them are new buildings." —Neel Dhanesha and Jeva Lange
April: A large, deadly heat wave baked much of Asia for two weeks in April,Axios reported. Parts of India saw temperatures beyond 40°C (104°F), while temperatures in Thailand reached their highest levels ever, breaking past 45°C (113°F) for the first time in that country's history. Thirteen people died in Mumbai, and hundreds of people across the Asian continent were hospitalized. —Neel Dhanesha
This article was first published on June 5, 2023. It was last updated on September 6, 2023, at 3:59 PM ET.
More about heat and how the world is coping:
1. The Deadly Mystery of Indoor Heat
2. Don’t Be Too Chill About Your Air Conditioning Dependency
3. America Is Depending on Renewables This Summer
4. Dermatologists Have Bad News to Share About Climate Change
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Current conditions: Yosemite could get 9 inches of snow between now and Sunday • Temperatures will rise to as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, as Central and Southeast Asia continue to bake in a heatwave • Hail, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms will pummel the U.S. Heartland into early next week.
It was a busy week of earnings calls for the clean energy sector, which, as a whole, saw investment dip by nearly $8 billion in the first three months of the year. Tariffs — especially as they impact the battery supply chain — as well as changes to federal policy under the new administration and electricity demand were the major themes of the week, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote.
Like companies across many different sectors, inverter and battery maker Enphase, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, Tesla, and the utility NextEra all mentioned the tariffs in their earnings reports and calls. Enphase, for one, is bracing for as much as 8% knocked off its gross margin by the third quarter, while Tesla’s highly-anticipated call managed expectations for the rest of the year, with the company citing the difficulty measuring “the impacts of global trade policy on the automotive and energy supply chains, our cost structure, and demand for durable goods and related services.” Meanwhile, on Thursday, Xcel Energy — which recently reached settlements for its role in the ignition of the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history and the largest wildfire in Texas history — reported missing first-quarter estimates and feeling the squeeze of high interest rates at a time of soaring, data-center-driven electricity demand.
The Department of Justice’s lawyers warned the Department of Transportation that its case against New York City’s congestion pricing program is likely a loser. We know this because someone mistakenly uploaded the DOJ’s memo into the court record for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lawsuit challenging Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s actions. Whoops.
As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reports, the leaked memo was dated before Duffy announced “he would put a moratorium on any new federal approvals for transit projects in Manhattan until the state shut down the tolling program.” But as Emily goes on to say, the memo “warns that continuing down this route could open up both the department and Duffy personally to further probes.” The New York Times adds that the DOT has since replaced the DOJ lawyers who authored the memo and plans to transfer the case to the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington.
More than 100 new cars and vehicles are expected to debut at the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show, which began on Wednesday and runs through next Friday. Of the approximately 1,300 total vehicles on display, 70% are new energy vehicles, according to Gu Chunting, the vice chairman of the Council for the Promotion of International Trade Shanghai, one of the event’s organizers.
The show is already off to an exciting start. Volkswagen is showcasing 50 new models, including three electrified concept vehicles specifically targeted at the Chinese market: the ID. Aura sedan, the ID. Evo SUV, and ID. Era three-row SUV, a hybrid with over 621 miles of range. BYD’s Denza line also premiered its Z, a luxury electric vehicle designed to compete with Tesla and Porsche. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but most people will find the Denza Z to be drop dead gorgeous,” Clean Technica raved.
That’s not all. The Faw Group, a Chinese state-owned car manufacturer, showed off a flying vehicle with a range of 124 miles, while fellow Chinese automaker Changan Automobile announced an autonomous flying car that reportedly already has government approval to transport passengers, per IoT World Today. France’s Le Monde was wowed by China’s innovations all around: “Gone are the days when the vast exhibition space had one hall dedicated to foreign brands and another for Chinese ones. Today, each Chinese group occupies a hall, showcasing domestic brands and leaving only some space for foreigners around the edges.”
Volkswagen
In a private ceremony Thursday night, President Trump signed an executive order to “unleash” deep-sea mining. The order — which directs the secretaries of Interior and Commerce to accelerate “the process of renewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits” for the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf and “areas beyond national jurisdiction”— is an attempt to offset China’s dominance of the critical minerals supply chain. Deep-sea mining operations harvest “nodules” that take millions of years to form and contain minerals like nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese necessary for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, among other applications. “For too long, we’ve been over reliant on foreign sources, and today this historic announcement marks a big step in the right direction to onshore these resources that are critical to national homeland security,” a senior administration official told reporters on Thursday, as reported by CNN.
Deep-sea mining is controversial due to how little we know about the ocean’s abyss, including the potential impact of large-scale mining operations on marine biodiversity and carbon sequestration. The United States has largely abstained from the deliberations of the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority, which determines whether and how to mine the seabed for critical minerals. The industrial mining of international waters, as cued up by Trump’s executive order, is opposed by “nearly all other nations,” The New York Times writes, and is “likely to provoke an outcry from America’s rivals and allies alike.”
It has already been a tragic year for wildfires, with more than 57,000 acres of Los Angeles and the surrounding hillsides burned in January. Now, AccuWeather is predicting that fires in the U.S. could “rapidly escalate” and burn up to 9 million acres total this year, well above the historic average of 7 million acres and close to the 8.9 million acres that burned in 2024.
Specifically, AccuWeather predicts an extreme fire season in the Northwest, northern Rockies, Southwest, and South Central states, particularly as late summer and fall approach. “There was plenty of rain and snow across Northern California this winter. All of that moisture has supported a lot of lush vegetation growth this spring,” AccuWeather’s lead long-range expert, Paul Pastelok, said. “That grass and brush will dry out and become potential fuel for wildfires this fall,” when any “trigger mechanism … could cause big wildfire problems.”
AccuWeather
Slate Auto, a three-year-old Jeff Bezos-backed startup, has announced an EV truck that will cost less than $20,000 after the federal tax credit and before customization. “It’s the Burger King of trucks,” writes Car and Driver, because “it’s affordable” and “lets customers ‘have it their way’ with a lengthy accessory list, including one that turns this pickup into an SUV.”
Three weeks after “Liberation Day,” Matador Resources says it’s adjusting its ambitions for the year.
America’s oil and gas industry is beginning to pull back on investments in the face of tariffs and immense oil price instability — or at least one oil and gas company is.
While oil and gas executives have been grousing about low prices and inconsistent policy to any reporter (or Federal Reserve Bank) who will listen, there’s been little actual data about how the industry is thinking about what investments to make or not make. That changed on Wednesday when the shale driller Matador Resources reported its first quarter earnings. The company said that it would drop one rig from its fleet of nine, cutting $100 million of capital costs.
“In response to recent commodity price volatility, Matador has decided to adjust its drilling and completion activity for 2025 to provide for more optionality,” the company said in its earnings release.
In February, Matador was projecting that its capital expenditures in 2025 would be between $1.4 and $1.65 billion.This week, it lowered that outlook to $1.3 to $1.55 billion. “We’re very open to and want to have reason to grow again,” Matador’s chief executive Joseph Foran said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. “This is primarily a timing matter. Is this a temporary thing on oil prices? Or is this a new world we live in?”
Mizuho Securities analyst William Janela wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning that, as the first oil exploration and production company to report its earnings this go-round, Matador would be “somewhat of a litmus test for the sector: we don't believe the market was expecting E&Ps to announce activity reductions this soon, but MTDR's update could signal more cuts to come from peers over the next few weeks.”
West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices are currently sitting at just below $63, up from around $60 in the wake of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. While the current price is off its lows, it’s still well short of the almost $84 a barrel crude prices were at around this time last year.
The price decline could be attributable to any number of factors — macroeconomic uncertainty due to the trade war, production hikes by foreign producers — but whatever the cause, it has made an awkward situation for the Trump administration’s energy strategy.
The iShares U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF, which tracks the American oil and gas exploration industry, is down 9% for the year and more than 13% since “Liberation Day,” while the rest of the market has almost recovered as the Trump administration has indicated it may ease up on some of his more drastic tariff policies.
If other drillers follow Matador’s investment slowdown, it could imperil Trump’s broader energy policy goals.
Trump has both encouraged other countries to produce more oil (and bragged about lower oil prices) while also exhorting American drillers to “drill, baby, drill,”with enticements ranging from kneecapping emissions standards to a reduced regulatory burden.
As Heatmap has written, these goals sit in conflict with each other. Energy executives told the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that they need oil prices ranging from $61 to $70 a barrelin order to profitably drill new wells. If prices fall further, “what would happen is ‘Delay, baby, delay,’”Wood Mackenzie analyst Fraser McKay wrote Wednesday. “We now expect global upstream development spend to fall year-on-year for the first time since 2020.”
A $65 per barrel price “dents” margins for drillers, meaning “growth capex and discretionary spend will be delayed,” McKay wrote.
Matador also announced that it had authorized $400 million worth of buybacks, and itsstock price rose some 4% on the earnings announcement, indicating that Wall Street will reward drillers who pull back on drilling and ramp up shareholder payouts.
“We’ve got the tools in the toolbox, including the share repurchase, to make Matador more value quarter by quarter,” Foran said. Rather than “blindly” pouring capital into growth, Matador would aim for a “measured pace,” he explained. “And if you mean what you say about a measured pace, that means when prices get a little lower, you take a few more moments to think about what you’re doing and don’t rush into things.”
At San Francisco Climate Week, everything is normal — until it very much isn’t.
San Francisco Climate Week started off on Monday with an existential bang. Addressing an invite-only crowd at the Exploratorium, a science museum on the city’s waterfront, former vice president and long-time climate advocate Al Gore put the significance and threat of this political moment — and what it means for the climate — in the most extreme terms possible. That is to say, he compared the current administration under President Trump to Nazi Germany.
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil,” Gore conceded before going on: “But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” Just as German philosophers in the aftermath of World War II found that the Nazis “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,” Gore said, so too is Trump’s administration “trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” in which we can keep burning fossil fuels forever. With his voice rising and gestures increasing in vigor, Gore ended his speech on a crescendo. “We have to protect our future. And if you doubt for one moment, ever, that we as human beings have that capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.”
The crowd went wild. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the stage and reminded the crowd that Gore has been telling us this for decades — maybe it’s time we listen. But I missed all that. Because just a few miles away, things were getting a little more in the weeds at the somewhat less exclusive venture capital-led panel entitled “The Economics of Climate Tech: Building Resilient, Scalable, and Sustainable Startups.” Here, I learned about a new iron-sodium battery chemistry and innovations in transformers for data centers, microgrids, and EV charging infrastructure.
I heard Tom Chi, founding partner of At One Ventures, utter sentences such as “parity dies because of capex inertia,” referring to the need to make clean tech not only equivalent to but cheaper than fossil-fuels on a unit economics basis. Such is the duality of climate week during the Trump administration — occasionally lofty in both its alarm and its excitement, but more often than not simply business-as-usual, interrupted by bouts of heady doom or motivational proclamations.
Some panels, like the one I moderated on the future of weather forecasting using artificial intelligence, made it a full hour without discussing Trump, tariffs, or tax credits at all. So far, that’s held true for a number of talks on how AI can be a boon to climate tech. It makes sense — the administration is excited about AI, and there’s really no indication that Trump has given any thought to either the positive or negative climate externalities of it.
But rapid data center buildout and the attendant renewables boom that it may (or may not) bring will certainly be influenced by the administration’s fluctuating policies, an issue that was briefly discussed during another panel: “AI x Energy: Gridlocked or Grid Unlocked?” Here, representatives from Softbank, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the data center builder and operator Switch touched on how market uncertainty is making it difficult to procure energy for data centers — and to figure out the cost of building a data center, period.
“There is a lot of refiguring and rereading contracts and looking at the potential exposure to things like the escalation in the cost of steel for construction projects,” Skyler Holloway of Switch said. Pinning down a price on the energy required to power data centers is also a bottleneck, Gillian Clegg, vice president of energy policy and procurement at PG&E explained. “For projects that want to connect between now and 2030, any kind of uncertainty or delay means that the generation doesn't get to the market,” Clegg said. “Maybe the load gets there first, and you have an out of balance situation.”
Everyone acknowledges that uncertainty is bad for business, and that delays related to funding, contracts, and construction can kill otherwise viable companies. But unsurprisingly, nobody here has admitted that said uncertainty might put them out of business, or even deeply in the red.Every panel I attend, I find myself wondering whether a founder or investor is finally going to raise their voice, à la Al Gore, and tell the audience that while their company’s business model is well and good, the Trump administration’s illogical antipathy towards green-coded tech and ill-conceived trade war is throwing the underlying logic — sound as it may have been just a year ago — into disarray.
None of the seven energy, food, and agricultural startups that presented at the nonprofit climate investor Elemental Impact’s main show, for instance, discussed the impacts of the administration’s policies on their businesses. Rather, they maintained a consistently upbeat tone as they described the promise of their concepts — which ranged from harnessing ocean energy to developing plant-based fertilizers to using robotics for electronics recycling — and the momentum building behind them. Nuclear and geothermal companies, seemingly poised to be the clean tech winners of Chris Wright’s Department of Energy, have been especially optimistic this week.
But really, what else can climate tech companies and investors be expected to do right now besides, well, rise and grind? It’s not like anybody has answers as to what’s coming down the policy pike. In a number of more casual conversations this week, a common sentiment I heard was that it’s not necessarily a bad time to be an early-stage startup — keep your head down, focus on research and prototyping, and reassess the political environment when you’re ready to build a pilot or demonstration plant. As for later-stage companies and venture capital firms, they’re likely working to ensure that their business models and portfolios really aren’t dependent on government subsidies, grants, or policies — as they keep assuring me is the case.
Even that might not be enough these days though. Chi said he’s always tailored his investments with At One Ventures towards companies that are viable based on unit economics alone, no subsidies and no green premium. So he wasn’t initially worried about his portfolio when Trump was elected. “None of our business models were invalidated by the election,” he said. “The only way that we could be in trouble is if they mess it up so bad that it ruins all of business, not just climate …”
Oops.
If there’s one dictum that I would expect to hold, though, it’s that the startups that make it through this period will likely be around for the long haul. I’ve been hearing that sentiment since the election, and Mona ElNagger, a partner at Valo Ventures, echoed it once again this week. “Microsoft and Apple were founded in the mid 1970s, which was a time of severe recession and stagflation. Amazon started at the tail end of a big recession in the early 1990s,” ElNagger reminded the audience at the Economics of Climate Tech panel, which she moderated. “Companies that survive and actually thrive in such periods share a common thread of resilience.”
As that panel wrapped up, things got existential once more as Chi’s talk moved from describing his investment thesis to the moment at large. “This time period in history is going to bring us tragedy after tragedy, and it’s really that moment that we’re going to understand the deep underlying structure of half of the world that we’ve built, and also the character of who we are,” Chi told the audience. It was unclear whether we were even talking about climate tech anymore. Chi continued, “It’s in that time period that we are going to step up and become whatever we are meant to be or not at all.”
The crowd sat there, a little stunned. Were we, in this very moment, becoming who we were meant to be? I took a bite of my free sushi as the networking and hobnobbing began.