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Helene’s winds stretch close to 500 miles across. That’s half the width of the entire Gulf of Mexico.
When Hurricane Helene began to take shape in the Gulf of Mexico, there was one factor that quickly made the storm stand out to meteorologists: its size. Helene is “unusually large,” the National Hurricane Center said; “exceptionally large,” per the Washington Post. Upon landfall, it was one of largest hurricanes in modern history, according to hurricane expert Michael Lowry — bigger than Harvey, bigger than Katrina, surpassed only by 2017’s Hurricane Irma, which was one of the costliest tropical storms on record and resulted in dozens of deaths.
Bigger does not always correlate to stronger. Discussions around the strength of a hurricane typically center on its wind speeds (which is what the categories connote) and the volume of rain it is expected to unleash. But in Helene’s case, there was both size and power — when the storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region late Thursday night, it was classified as a Category 4 storm, with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 61 of the state’s 67 counties ahead of the storm, speaking to the breadth of damage he expects to see and the long recovery process to come. Already, images of flooded streets are circulating on social media, multiple deaths have been reported, and millions are without electricity. As Helene continues its course, it’s bringing tropical storm conditions to Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee.
In the hours and days to come, we’ll get a better understanding of how well forecasters did predicting the path and strength of this storm, a task that has become increasingly difficult. Because at the same time technology has improved oversight of these storms, with artificial intelligence models that have raised the bar for prediction accuracy and the ability to deploy radar systems as they pass overhead, climate change is altering the ingredients that feed their formation. For example, record-high temperatures in oceans have changed the behavior of storms as they form, Matt Lanza, who monitors Atlantic storm activity for The Eyewall, explained to me, resulting in more storms intensifying rapidly ahead of landfall. This has made storms like 2023’s Hurricane Idalia tougher to predict, despite being closely tracked.
Helene, too, rapidly intensified on its way to reaching land. The area of Florida where it hit, a little over 50 miles from the state capital in Tallahassee, is no stranger to storms— in just the past 13 months, Florida’s Big Bend has had to absorb the impacts of both Idalia and Hurricane Debby, each of which caused billions of dollars in damages. Still, Truchelut said Hurricane Helene could be a “truly unprecedented scenario for North Florida.” Part of the unusual force behind this storm can be attributed to another unprecedented scenario — the warmth of the water in the Gulf of Mexico. CBS News said the water surface temperature below the storm’s formation was up to 89 degrees Fahrenheit, which is as much as 4 degrees above average. This follows the overall Gulf warming trend observed by NOAA, which the agency says “increases the intensity of hurricanes.”
Another factor that allowed Helene to grow so huge so fast was the lack of wind shear, a term meteorologists use to refer to the way wind changes speed or direction or both across different elevations. Strong upper-level winds can inhibit storms from forming or growing. In Helene’s case, however, warm water was accompanied by low wind shear and plenty of moisture— conditions that aligned to provide tremendous energy for the storm’s formation. The only thing really standing in Helene’s way was its own size, Lanza noted, which would have made it more difficult for the storm to get organized and strengthen further.
The most obvious reason size matters is the footprint the storm will have on land. To give you an idea of just how large Helene is, Lowry said in his newsletter Friday that the full breadth of its winds upon landfall stretched over 450 miles across, nearly half the entire width of the Gulf of Mexico. This means the effects of the storm began long before it officially made landfall and will continue long after the eye of the storm has moved on.
Hours before Helene officially reached Florida, rain was already drenching communities in the storm’s projected path. Meanwhile, “Severe and life-threatening impacts from Helene will occur hundreds of miles from the cone confines, especially on the eastern half of the storm,” Florida meteorologist Ryan Truchelut wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat, summing up just how far-reaching Helene’s effects could be. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a self-described “rare news release” on Wednesday to warn of the potential for major flooding as far inland as Appalachia, some 300 miles from the Gulf Coast.
Another serious size-related consideration relates to the potential storm surge, or how far above average tides the water will rise. “When you have a storm this big, you’re just inherently moving a lot of water over a broader area,” Lanza said. As Hurricane Helene’s eye approached Florida, water levels easily surpassed multiple storm surge records. But what stood out to Lanza was not just that the surge was powerful, it was also that the threat of surge was so widespread. “A much smaller storm, you can still have a very large storm surge, but it’s going to be very isolated near to where it comes ashore,” he told me. “With a storm like Helene, because of its size, near and east of where it comes ashore, you’re going to have a massive storm surge — and you’re going to have a pretty big storm surge even down the coast from that.” The NHC warned that much of Florida’s Western coastline would see multiple feet of water.
Messaging the risks of these storms to an extreme weather-weary public is another challenge stemming from climate change. “Record breaking” has now become a familiar phrase for most of us, describing everything from extreme temperatures to rainfall rates. But as tropical storms become more intense, fueled by warming-influenced weather conditions, finding ways to accurately convey threats to the public is increasingly essential.
Ahead of Helene’s landfall, the NHC stressed that the storm surge would be “unsurvivable,” encouraging residents to heed evacuation orders. According to The New York Times, the warnings — paired with memories of those other recent storms — seemed to have worked, leaving Big Bend-area towns “eerily empty.” Even the local Waffle House, a business widely recognized for making its own assessments of hurricane risk, was shuttered on Thursday.
The NHC is experimenting with new graphics in hopes of better conveying risks outside of the classic “cone of uncertainty,” which illustrates the predicted path of a tropical storm’s eye. The center shared an image on social media showing inland risks from storms, not just those along the coast.
So if you noticed the NHC’s risk map for Hurricane Helene colored the entire state in a palette of watches and warnings, the reason why is twofold: Yes, the risks really are that widespread with this storm, but the agency is also trying to get better at telling you about them. And in the case of major hurricane like Helene, the more warning, the better.
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The Federal Highway Administration believes it has found a workaround to a court-ordered stay of execution.
The Federal Highway Administration issued a letter to state Departments of Transportation on Thursday declaring that states were no longer authorized to spend billions of dollars previously approved for electric vehicle charging networks. The decree pertains to the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, or NEVI, a program created in 2021 under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated $5 billion to states to strategically build electric vehicle charging networks along major roads.
The program has been under threat since the day Donald Trump stepped into the White House. His executive order “Unleashing American Energy,” which ordered agencies to pause the disbursement of funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, specifically called out NEVI as a program to freeze. Twenty-two Democrat-controlled states quickly took legal action, and a U.S. District court issued a temporary restraining order requiring the Trump administration to keep congressionally-approved funds flowing, at least to those states.
In general, advocates believed the NEVI program was untouchable. The program’s “safeguards make it nearly impossible to claw back money already allocated, except in cases of misuse or noncompliance.” Beth Hammond, a senior advocate for EV infrastructure at the Natural Resources Defense Counsel wrote in a recent blog post.
But the Federal Highway Administration apparently thinks it has found a workaround.
Under NEVI, states are each allocated a certain amount of money every year for five years, and they have to submit an annual plan for how they intend to use the funds. Those plans must align with overall program guidance published by the secretary of transportation.
Now, the new leadership at the Department of Transportation has decided to rescind the previously issued guidance. That means the state plans that were previously approved are no longer valid, the letter says: “Therefore, effective immediately, no new obligations may occur under the NEVI Formula Program until the updated final NEVI Formula Program Guidance is issued and new State plans are submitted and approved.”
An important thing to understand about NEVI is that after a state has its annual plan approved, it is legally entitled to that year’s allocation of funding. That doesn’t mean said funding immediately gets transferred into the state’s coffers, however. States have to continually request reimbursement from the federal DOT as they implement their programs. So, for example, if a state puts out a request for proposals for NEVI projects, it can then invoice the federal government for the related administrative costs. Once the state awards grants to specific projects, those projects have to reach certain benchmarks before they get any money. If the first benchmark is getting permits, for example, then once a project is permitted, its developer can invoice the state government for the associated costs, and then the state government can file with the federal government for reimbursement.
According to Paren, an EV charging data analytics firm that has been closely following the rollout of the NEVI program, states are legally entitled to spend roughly $3.27 billion on NEVI. That accounts for plans approved for fiscal years 2022 through 2025. To date, states have awarded about $615 million of the funds to just under 1,000 projects — with 10% of those projects being led by Tesla.
The letter says states will still be able to get reimbursed for expenses related to previously awarded projects, “in order to not disrupt current financial commitments.” But the more than $2.6 billion that has not been awarded will be frozen.
Prior to the memo issued Thursday, states had been divided over how to respond to the chaos of executive orders and court orders. At least six states — Alabama, Ohio, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Missouri, and Oklahoma — had already suspended their programs indefinitely.
“We are still working with FHWA to understand specific impacts to NEVI funding,” a spokesperson for the Ohio DOT told me on Thursday prior to the federal letter being released. Ohio had been an unexpected early leader for the NEVI program. It was the first state in the country to bring a NEVI-funded charging station online, in October 2023. It has since opened 18 additional stations, more than any other state, and has selected awardees to build 24 more. Missouri, by contrast, had been lagging behind. The state had not yet issued a single request for proposals.
But at least until Thursday evening, other states, such as Oregon and California, were advancing their programs. The Oregon DOT posted an informational notice about federal grants on its website earlier this week saying that NEVI funding was not frozen. A spokesperson for the California DOT told me on Thursday afternoon that, “For now, federal courts have prohibited federal agencies from pausing or terminating payment of federal financial assistance funds,” and that “Caltrans’ services remain fully operational.” When I followed up asking if these comments took into account the new letter issued Thursday, the agency said it would need to get back to me on Friday.
The decision to rescind the guidance and invalidate state plans is sure to face court challenges. The Federal Highway Administration, for its part, said it plans to issue new draft guidance for NEVI in the spring, which will then be subject to public comment before being finalized — so the agency doesn’t seem to be trying to throw the program out altogether.
This is a developing story and we will update it with perspectives on the letter as we learn more.
The political marriage of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the EV mogul and world’s richest man, has significantly changed the outlook for what the Trump administration might mean for energy policy, decarbonization, and the rule of law.
Musk has taken over numerous offices responsible for crucial functions within the federal government, including the Office of Personnel Management at the White House. Musk has snatched control of the federal government’s payments system, and he and his team have illegally tried to use it to block payments to federal programs, according to CNN and The New York Times. Conservative budget experts say that such a move violates the Constitution, which grants sole control over the power of the purse to Congress.
What’s the issue? The problem here is not primarily that Musk is unelected — there are lots of powerful people in every administration who are not elected (though few have ever had as many conflicts of interest as Musk, the CEO of the world’s most valuable automaker in Tesla and the holder of many government contracts via the rocket company SpaceX and satellite internet provider Starlink). Nor would it be a problem if Musk were merely trying to modernize the government’s IT systems.
The problem is that Musk has used his control of a technical system — the software that the government uses to send more than a billion payments a year — to assert effective control over federal programs and policies. This is why Musk trying to shut off payments that have been appropriated by Congress matters: He is in essence saying that because he can do something with the software, he may do it.
The issue is that the government can do many things that it broadly does not do because they are illegal.
But Trump and Musk together are now testing the limits of the law.
The Trump administration is operating on a legal theory that the president can simply decide not to spend money that has been appropriated by Congress. Key officials in the Trump administration argue that Congress sets a ceiling, but not a floor, when it appropriates federal funding. It also believes that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which Congress passed during the Nixon administration, is unconstitutional.
I find it hard to believe that the Supreme Court — which last year severely limited the executive branch’s ability to interpret congressional laws which create and govern agencies — agrees with Trump that the president can ignore those same laws when they govern federal spending. But the Court has reached shocking decisions on Trump’s behalf before.
Trump’s team seems to be trying to make this legal theory central to how his entire administration works. Impoundment underpinned the White House’s attempt last month to block all outgoing federal grants and loans, which briefly threw the government into chaos before it was blocked by a judge and ultimately rescinded.
Musk’s ploy, seemingly, is to move so fast that these legal and constitutional questions become moot. If he can close a federal agency’s offices, put its workers on leave, and cut off funding to its programs, then perhaps it won’t matter what a judge says about impoundment itself. And if Musk can control the tap of public money, turning it on and off at will, then he can usurp the operation of the United States government.
In the world of climate and energy, Musk’s prominence — and the lack of precedent for his situation — raises important questions for businesses and policy makers. Here is what we do not know about Musk today:
In 2010, the federal government issued a $465 million loan to Tesla so that it could build a factory in California for its Model S sedan.
In recent years, the government has made similar deals, lending tens of billions of dollars to other companies that make electric vehicles or that mine and refine critical minerals.
Last month, the Biden administration closed a $6.57 billion loan to Rivian, the electric truck maker, so that it could build a new factory in Georgia.
Some of these new borrowers, including Rivian and legacy automakers like Ford, compete with Tesla. It is still unclear whether Musk will be able to use his control of the federal government’s checkbook to cut off some loans and allow others to proceed. Doing so would ultimately stifle competition in the EV sector, benefitting Tesla, where Musk remains CEO.
The White House said this week that Trump is allowing Musk to police his own conflicts of interest.
In December, Musk called for Congress to “get rid” of the clean energy tax credits created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Most tax credits are claimed by companies against what they owe on their taxes, meaning that they result in negative revenue to the government. But the IRA created a new kind of credit — a so-called “direct payment” — that allowed states, schools, churches, tribes, and other entities without federal tax liability to claim money for installing clean energy or buying electric vehicles.
Those payments — and any other tax refunds — ultimately run through the Treasury Department’s computer systems. It remains unclear whether Musk can use control of the federal government’s checkbook to block the payout of these payments.
One of Musk’s initiatives, the U.S. DOGE Service, is housed at the General Services Administration, or GSA.
The GSA is the government’s internal landlord and facilities manager — it owns, builds, and manages federal office space. It also operates parts of the federal vehicle fleet.
Under the Biden administration, it undertook a number of energy sustainability and efficiency initiatives. Some of these programs were canceled by President Trump’s initial set of executive orders, but the full scope of Musk’s authority in the agency remains unclear.
Last year, the U.S. military was investigating whether Elon Musk complied with the rules of his security clearance, according to The New York Times.
At the time, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, had already declined to pursue the highest level security clearance for Musk, in part because of reports around his open drug use and contact with foreign leaders, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk is reported to hold a “Top Secret” clearance.
The Journal has also previously reported that Musk conducted secret conversations with Vladimir Putin and that Musk’s drug use worries Tesla and SpaceX executives.
Tesla has deep ties in China. It achieved record sales in China last year, although its market share has fallen as Chinese EV companies have out-competed its aging vehicle line-up. Tesla is reportedly opening a new factory in Shanghai this month. Musk has also staked out public positions that favor the Chinese Community Party’s views. In 2022, he suggested that Taiwan could become a “special administrative zone” of the People’s Republic of China.
It’s unclear how these commitments might affect his work for the U.S. government.
Three tactics from Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, on how the industry can use this time wisely.
Erin Burns has been here before. The executive director of Carbon180, a carbon removal research and policy nonprofit, joined the organization as its first policy director in 2018, partway through Donald Trump’s first term as president. It was under that administration that she helped win the first ever dedicated federal research and development funding for carbon removal, a modest $60 million in 2019.
It’s a very different world today than it was then, so she wasn’t exactly here. There’s now billions of dollars in federal funding appropriated to pull carbon from the atmosphere — not just for research and development, but also for building commercial-scale projects and purchasing carbon removal services. At the same time, this new Trump administration is moving more quickly and aggressively than the last one to undo anything resembling climate policy, and future attempts to re-allocate some of that money are not out of the question.
I recently spoke to Burns about how she’s looking to make progress on carbon removal under these circumstances. Here are my big takeaways from the conversation.
It’s not yet clear how the Trump administration or new Congress is going to act on existing carbon removal programs. Although the industry has a history of receiving bipartisan support and federally-funded carbon removal projects are happening in Republican states and districts, that doesn’t mean these programs are safe. “The rollback of certain policies are not ultimately going to be about how people feel about direct air capture or carbon removal,” Burns told me. “It’s going to be a broader ideology around the role of a place like the Department of Energy, and what kinds of supports the federal government should provide.”
With that in mind, Burns’ motto is “the best defense is a good offense.” That means working with the congresspeople who supported the direct air capture hubs to highlight why the government should continue investing in them. It also involves working with labor unions with members in heavy industry who see the jobs potential. It’s time to double down on a more expansive argument for the benefits of these projects, she said. “There are additional benefits to every carbon removal pathway. We should always be talking about them. Climate’s not going to be the argument that gets you those really durable political coalitions.”
Playing offense also means planning for the next opening. The reason the Biden administration made so much progress on carbon removal, Burns said, is that advocates like her spent two years under the Trump administration meeting weekly, developing policy and “socializing” it, so that it was “ready to go.” As policy enactment in Washington slows down, advocates will have more capacity to sit down and develop the next wave of ideas. To Burns, that means thinking about a more tailored, ground-up approach.
“To be honest, we don’t really have carbon removal policy in the United States,” Burns told me. “We have direct air capture policy, and even that is, like, point-source carbon capture policy that’s been tweaked to fit direct air capture.” An example is the 45Q tax credit, which was originally created to support projects that capture carbon from the smokestacks of coal plants, but was expanded to support direct air capture projects as well.
But carbon removal is not just direct air capture — it’s also planting trees and grinding rocks, activities that likely require different policies and supports than big air-sucking machines to scale up. Leveraging all that to its fullest extent will require a more expansive policy regime.
“Let’s start from scratch,” Burns said. “Start to grapple with the fundamental nature of carbon removal as a unique thing that isn’t going to be deployed only with the policies that we’ve used to deploy technologies like solar. Because carbon removal is not going to create electricity, for example. It’s not just about making it cheap enough that there’s going to be this market force. Making it cheaper is great, but you also have to think about the other barriers.”
Before coming to Carbon180, Burns worked at the center-left think tank Third Way on carbon capture and nuclear energy policy. While she was there, Trump proposed dramatically slashing the Department of Energy’s budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and eliminating the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which supports the early development of technologies that are too risky for private investment.
“You can get some unusual bedfellows together when you have an administration that’s trying to cut, say, all of the Department of Energy,” Burns said. Instead of renewable developers and nuclear power companies and carbon removal startups all fighting for a piece of the pie, there’s incentive to come together and “make sure the pie still exists.”
It’s not just about preserving funding. The carbon removal industry also needs to be making inroads with adjacent industries because they have common interests. Direct air capture facilities need renewable energy to operate. and right now the future of renewable energy is under major threat. Similarly, direct air capture projects need the Environmental Protection Agency to be well-staffed enough to continue permitting carbon sequestration wells — a process that was slow to start but starting to pick up at the end of Biden’s term. “I think there’s value in us thinking about what it means to not just defend carbon removal, but defend all of this climate infrastructure that is going to be necessary for us to be successful.”
In her past work on carbon capture, Burns grew familiar with a divide between players who were genuinely trying to fight climate change and those for whom carbon capture was just a line in their advertising budget. In her view, the carbon removal industry has been different, with most companies genuinely trying to do the right thing for the climate. It’s an open question as to whether that might change in this new political environment, she said.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy was staffed with some of the leading carbon removal experts in the country. Now there may be less pressure on companies to have high standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying carbon removal outcomes — meaning more of an opening to fudge the truth of how much benefit their projects are providing.
The Trump administration is also scaling back the size of agencies’ staff and removing requirements for companies that receive financial assistance to do things like ensure that the communities hosting their projects also benefit from them. Burns said the onus is on organizations like Carbon180 and on corporate carbon removal buyers to maintain high standards not just for measurement, but also for community engagement. “If you care about deploying CDR, you need to care about local support for those projects,” she said.
For one, community opposition can shut down a project. But also, bringing benefits to host communities helps build political support for carbon removal that can lead to more federal aid down the line. “Those are keys for long-term success.”