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Will America’s luck hold in 2024? The oddsmakers — that is, scientists — have a bad feeling.
Are you feeling lucky?
Americans are. Close to two-thirds say they’ve gambled in the past year; the sports pages are filled with headlines detailing the fallout of various investigations and scandals. But while there isn’t exactly a bookmaker for something like the Atlantic hurricane season, meteorologists around the country are feeling pretty good about their bets this time around.
“We could be extremely wrong and only have two hurricanes,” Philip Klotzbach, one of the authors of the Colorado State University’s 2024 forecast, which came out earlier this month and predicted a whopping 23 named storms, told me. “But I think the odds of that this year are very low, just because the Atlantic is so warm.”
Traditionally, early spring is when Americans begin to hear from agencies and universities about the upcoming Atlantic storm season. That won’t peak for another four or five months, and from the safety of April, it can be tough to muster concern about what late summer might yet inflict upon the nation’s coasts.
Still, the trickle of headlines this year has been nothing short of alarming. In addition to CSU’s prediction, North Carolina State University issued a forecast of between 15 and 20 named storms in 2024, meaning we could potentially tick well above the 1991-2020 average of 14 per year. On Wednesday, the Weather Channel upped the ante with a new estimate of 24 named storms. AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Forecaster Alex DaSilva told me his team estimates there is a 15% chance of 30 or more named storms this year — enough to break the record set in 2020 and exhaust the World Meteorological Organization pre-prepared list of 21 storm names, forcing it to dip into its new and never-before-used “supplemental” list.
Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is busy putting together its own forecast, a massive, multi-agency collaboration between the National Climate Prediction Center, the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. While the government’s final prediction is still a few weeks away from being made public in May, Matthew Rosencrans, the lead hurricane season forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, told me the agency’s ocean team has been providing monthly briefings on the Atlantic’s record warmth to the forecasters. Of particular concern to the teams is the fact that even if the summer sea surface warms at the lowest rateof any year since 1980, 2024 will still be in the top four of all sea surface temperature years since then.
Michael Lowry, the hurricane and storm surge specialist at Miami’s WPLG Local 10 News, told me this is what has him the most alarmed. “I struggle to find a good language to say how extreme and unprecedented it is, but it’s extreme and unprecedented and almost scary, the amount of warmth that we’re looking at in the Atlantic,” he said.
Warm water, of course, is hurricane Red Bull — it can increase a storm’s destructive potential, taking forecasters by surprise. In addition to the waning El Niño and the likely start of a La Niña — which will make the wind conditions more favorable to Atlantic storm formation — all the agencies I spoke with cited the sea-surface temperatures as a concerning complication in their predictive models. Klotzbach, the CSU researcher, told me the record-warm water gives him more confidence in his models than he would otherwise have this early in April because of the strong correlation between warm waters and storm formation; DaSilva, at AccuWeather, told me it is these same temperatures that have made him concerned about the potential for rapidly intensifying storms like Hurricane Ian in 2022.
Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus in atmospheric science at MIT, was not as impressed by the predictions, however. Putting a numerical estimate on how many hurricanes will form in the North Atlantic in a given season is “not really very interesting or practical,” he told me. “If you’re a gambler, and you’re placing a bet, OK — but if you’re a coastal resident, what you really care about is relatively intense landfalling storms.”
The more storms there are in the Atlantic in a given season, the more likely intense storms will make landfall — “but not a lot” more likely, Emanuel stressed. Because of that, when it comes to making hurricane season predictions, “I wish NOAA would knock it off because it’s intentionally misleading,” he said.
Emanuel wasn’t alone in his dismissal of the seasonal forecasts. “I’ve got to be straight with you: I think they have limited utility,” John Cangialosi, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, who focuses more on tracking storms as they form, told me. “It’s sort of like in Powerball, when someone sees $30 million and is like, ‘I’m going to play if it’s $5 million or not,’” he added. “It’s so damn silly. You need to worry about this no matter what.”
That’s because describing hurricane seasons as “quiet” or “active” is really a matter of perspective, even if it makes for good headlines. For example, most people consider 2023 to have been a quiet year since almost no major storms made landfall on U.S. coasts. “But it was a very busy season; just fortunately, most of the storms stayed out at sea,” Klotzbach, of CSU, told me.
In a sense, America merely got a lucky break. While Hurricane Idalia, the strongest storm to hit Florida’s Big Bend region in 125 years, made landfall in 2023, its greatest impact was in a sparsely populated area, leading to limited damage and loss of life. On the other hand, 1992 was technically a “quiet” year for hurricane formation, but all it took was one storm — in that case, Hurricane Andrew, which killed over 60 people and was one of the costliest storms in U.S. history — to cement it in our collective memory.
Further complicating the picture that hurricane forecasts paint is, of course, climate change. The combination of record-warm Atlantic waters and a forecast for an active year makes it tempting to tie the two together. “The human mind is so good at pattern recognition that it wants to attribute a cause to every effect,” Emanuel, the MIT professor, said.
But there’s a whole cocktail of factors driving the Atlantic’s bonkers-warm temperature, including the aforementioned El Niño, which is just part of a naturally occurring global weather pattern known as ENSO; the decreasing presence of sulfur dioxide aerosols, which have a cooling effect; the Tonga volcano eruption, which might have had a temporary warming effect; and yes, greenhouse gas emissions. The lack of clarity around this larger picture has led some researchers to sound an alarm about the urgency of sharpening our understanding; climate change, however, can only confidently be credited with a small portion of the current anomalous spike in sea surface temperatures, which in turn only explains only about 35% to 40% of the changes in tropical cyclone activity.
“It’s not fair to say climate change has caused record warmth, which has caused record hurricanes,” Cangialosi, at the Climate Prediction Center, said. “Because, guess what? Next year we could be in a cool phase — and then where did climate change go?”
That’s far from saying climate change isn’t a factor at all; we just need to be careful with our scales. Besides, there are things we know are directly connected to climate change — like rising sea levels and increased rainfall — that will make hurricane landfalls deadlier in the coming decades.
Hurricane forecasts aren’t totally useless, either. For one thing, they have enormous scientific value, helping researchers better understand the amalgamation of conditions that go into the formation of a major tropical storm. Lowry, the Florida-based meteorologist, also joked they can help confirm that “my job may be a lot busier in the next few months.”
There is a public value, too: Headlines inarguably help keep the approaching season top-of-mind. This is especially important for the masses of new residents who have recently moved to the Gulf Coast and Southeastern shores — undeterred by subsidized insurance rates that don’t properly warn of the region’s risk — and might lack knowledge of how to prepare for the season.
After all, Mother Nature ultimately has the house advantage. And while America was spared a catastrophic storm in 2023, luck has a funny way of running out.
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On the Senate Finance Committee’s budget proposal, the NRC, and fossil-fuel financing
Current conditions: A brush fire that prompted evacuations in Maui on Sunday and Monday is now 93% contained • The Des Moines metro area issued its first-ever ban on watering lawns due to record nitrate concentrations in nearby rivers • For only the fourth time since 1937, Vancouver, British Columbia got no rain at all in the first half of June. The dry streak may finally break tonight.
The Senate Finance Committee published its portion of the budget reconciliation bill on Monday night, including details of its highly anticipated plan to revise the nation’s clean energy tax credits. Though the Senate version slightly softens the House’s proposed phase out of tax credits, “the text would still slash many of the signature programs of the Inflation Reduction Act,” my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Robinson Meyer write in their breakdown of the bill. Other changes to be aware of include:
There’s more, too, which you can read here.
President Trump fired Chris Hanson, a Democrat and his first-term appointee to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Friday. Trump “terminated my position … without cause, contrary to existing law and longstanding precedent regarding removal of independent agency appointees,” Hanson said in his announcement, published Monday. Since the creation of the NRC, which regulates nuclear power, no commissioner has ever been fired from the body.
After being appointed by Trump in 2020, Hanson was promoted to chair the commission by President Biden in 2021. His term ended in January, after which he returned to serving on the board, Notus reports. Trump’s decision to fire Hanson comes on the heels of his recent flurry of executive orders aimed at quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity, including a measure seeking to “simplify and accelerate the NRC’s licensing procedure, giving the body 18 months to issue new rules and guidance designed to shorten the timeline for processing new applications to 18 months at the longest,” as my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Katie Brigham explained last month. News of Hanson’s firing was met with “serious dismay” by attendees of the American Nuclear Society conference underway in Chicago, per Katy Huff, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a statement, ANS argued that a “competent, effective, and fully staffed [NRC] is essential to the rapid deployment of new reactors and advanced technologies.”
Banks increased fossil fuel financing by more than one-fifth in 2024, marking the first time that fossil fuel financing has failed to decline since 2021, a new report by the Rainforest Action Network and other environmental groups found. Among the world’s top 65 largest banks, coal, oil, and gas assets rose by $162 billion, to $869 billion, with JPMorgan Chase seeing the biggest increase of more than a third to $53.5 billion, followed by Citigroup, Bank of America, and Barclays. In a statement to the Financial Times, JPMorgan said it believed its own data “reflects our activities more comprehensively,” and said it provided $1.29 in clean-energy financing for every dollar financing fossil fuels. However, as the report argues, “Banks are abandoning their previously announced emissions reduction targets in favor of temperature trajectories that allow for more fossil fuel finance. Though they may also increase financing of renewable energy, banks’ continued fossil fuel finance entrenches climate chaos and undercuts clean energy development.” Read the full findings here.
Drivers in Europe are becoming more unwilling to consider switching to an electric vehicle, outpacing even the growing reluctance seen in the United States, according to a new survey published by Shell on Tuesday. In Europe, 41% of respondents said they’d consider switching to an EV, down from 48% last year, while in the U.S., the number fell only 3 percentage points, to 31%. “Europe surprised us,” David Bunch, Shell’s chief for mobility and convenience, said, per Reuters. “The single biggest barrier to entry is the cost of the vehicle.”
While Shell — the world’s second-biggest fossil fuel company by revenue and profit — might seem an unlikely source for an electric vehicle survey, the company also has the most extensive EV charging network in the UK. Its findings weren’t all negative, either: in China, interest in buying an electric vehicle was as high as 89%. Additionally, Shell found that nine in 10 EV drivers would consider purchasing an electric vehicle again, and 60% said they worry less about running out of charge than they did a year ago, Bloomberg reports. Separately, International Energy Agency data shows that electric vehicle adoption continues at a healthy pace worldwide, exceeding 17 million sales globally in 2024, or a share of more than 20%.
Global electric car sales, 2014-2024
IEA
The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced its commitment of £7.9 billion, or more than $10 billion, to the nation’s most extensive flood defense infrastructure program in its history. The program will not only include traditional construction, such as flood barriers, but also nature-based solutions like reforestation and wetland restoration, according to Business Green. In its announcement, the government said that for every £1 invested, it expected to prevent £8 in economic damage. “Protecting citizens is the first duty of any government,” Environment Secretary Steve Reed said in a statement, adding, “As our changing climate continues to bring more extreme weather to the nation, it's never been more vital to invest in new flood defences and repair our existing assets.” Separately, the U.K. Treasury also announced Tuesday a plan to spend £1 billion, or about $1.3 billion, on “funding to repair bridges, tunnels, and flyovers that are facing increased impacts from extreme weather and heavier vehicles,” Business Green adds.
Republicans in Los Angeles who don’t have air conditioning are “more likely to consider climate change a human-caused threat and more likely to support individual and government action to address climate change” than Republicans who have central air, a recent study published by the American Meteorological Society found. There was no similar divide among Democrats.
Wind and solar are out. Clean, firm power is in.
The Senate Finance committee published its highly anticipated tax proposal for Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill on Monday night, including a new plan to revise the nation’s clean energy tax credits.
Senate Republicans widened the aperture slightly compared to the House version of the bill, extending tax credits for geothermal energy, batteries, and hydropower, and preserving “transferability” — a crucial rule that allows companies to sell their tax credits for cash — for years to come.
But the text would still slash many of the signature programs of the Inflation Reduction Act. It would be particularly damaging for Republicans’ goals of creating a domestic mining industry, because it kills incentives for refining critical minerals while yanking away subsidies for the electric cars and wind turbines that might use those minerals.
Consumer tax credits for energy efficiency upgrades, including heat pumps, would still be terminated, as would credits for homeowners to lease or purchase rooftop solar. The Senate bill also cuts a tax deduction for energy efficiency upgrades in commercial buildings one year after the bill’s passage, which was not in the House version.
There was no mercy for the IRA’s tax credit to produce clean hydrogen, despite a last-minute appeal from more than 250 organizations in early June. That policy would still be terminated this year.
Here’s a rundown of the rest of the major changes.
Like the House bill, the Senate’s proposal would terminate tax credits for new, used, and leased electric vehicles. But while the House had extended the program by one year for automakers that had yet to sell 200,000 eligible vehicles, the Senate version would simply end the program in 180 days — or roughly six months — after the bill’s passage.
Depending on when the bill is passed, the Senate version could work out better for some experienced EV automakers, such as Tesla and General Motors. These automakers are set to lose their eligibility for tax credits on December 31 under the House text. But the Senate bill’s 180-day period could allow them to eke out another month or so of eligibility — especially if congressional negotiations over the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act go late into the summer.
Newer EV automakers, such as Rivian or Lucid, come out worse under the Senate text as compared to the House bill since they haven’t sold as many vehicles.
Homeowners interested in electric vehicle chargers would get a longer runway than the House had proposed — but a much shorter one than is on the books right now. Under current law, homeowners can claim the charger tax credit through 2032. The Senate version would terminate the 30% tax credit for installing a home charger one year after the bill is enacted.
The Inflation Reduction Act achieved massive greenhouse gas reductions by including a set of new “technology-neutral” tax credits that subsidized any new power plant as long as it didn’t emit carbon dioxide. Under current law, these new tax credits will remain effective and on the books for decades to come — expiring only when emissions from the country’s power sector fall about 95% below their all-time high.
The Republican reconciliation bills have dismantled these provisions. The House text proposed immediately winding down tax credits for all clean energy sources — except nuclear — and allowed just a 60-day “grace period” for new projects to start construction to claim the credits. Even then, new power plants would have to enter service by 2028 to qualify.
Senate Republicans have countered with a plan that is designed to maintain support for every electricity source that isn’t wind and solar. The GOP Senate caucus favors technologies that can provide power on demand around the clock — such as geothermal, nuclear, hydropower, and batteries — but technically the Senate text allows any zero-carbon, non-solar, non-wind source to qualify for the clean electricity tax credits for the next decade.
The Senate draft erases the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that would have kept these tax credits in place until the entire United States power sector reduces its emissions. Instead, it adopts the IRA’s alternate phase-out period, with the tax credits beginning to wind down for projects that start construction in 2034.
Tax credits for wind and solar, however, would begin to phase down for projects that start construction next year, and terminate after 2027, with one big exception.
An odd addendum to the wind and solar phase-out would exempt projects that are at least 1 gigawatt, are at least partially on federal land, and have already received a “right-of-way grant or lease” from the Bureau of Land Management as of June 16. It’s unclear which, if any, projects would be helped by this provision. According to the BLM website, it has not granted a right-of-way to any projects that are 1 gigawatt or larger except for the Lava Ridge wind farm, which has been canceled. If the Senate changes the date, however, the Esmeralda 7 solar farm in Nevada may benefit, as the project is more than 6 gigawatts, and is in the final stages of its environmental review.
The Senate text would not do anything to change the eligibility timeline for existing nuclear plants to claim a tax credit, called 45U, designed to keep them solvent. It would keep the schedule written into the Inflation Reduction Act, which has the credit terminating at the end of 2031. It would, however, impose new foreign sourcing restrictions on nuclear fuel, forbidding existing power plants from claiming the tax credit if their fuel comes from Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea. (It makes an exception for power companies that signed a long-term contract to buy foreign fuel before 2023.) The United States formally banned the import of nuclear fuel from Russia last year.
The Inflation Reduction Act subsidized the production of certain clean energy equipment — including solar panels, wind turbines, inverters, and batteries — as well as some of their subcomponents. Under current law, those tax credits will begin to phase out by 25% increments in 2030, so companies can claim 75% of the credit in 2030, 50% in 2031, and zero in 2033.
The IRA also created a new permanent tax credit that covered 10% of the cost of refining or recycling critical minerals.
The new Senate text changes these phase-out deadlines, often for the worse. First, as in the House bill, wind turbines and their subcomponents would no longer qualify for the tax credit starting in 2028. Second, the tax credit for critical minerals would start phasing out in 2031. Under the new calendar, companies would be able to claim 75% of this credit in 2031, 50% in 2032, and zero in 2034.
In practice, this means that the Senate GOP text would end the IRA’s permanent tax credit for producing many critical minerals, which would damage the financial projects of many mineral processing and refining projects. Other types of equipment remain on the Inflation Reduction Act’s original phase-out schedule.
The new Senate text also slightly expands the type of battery components that qualify for the credit. And — in a potentially significant change for some companies — it forbids companies from stacking tax credits for their vertically integrated production process starting in 2027.
While the House did not touch the tax credit for carbon sequestration, the Senate has put forward a key change favored by many proponents of the technology. Under current law, project operators get the highest-value credit if they simply inject captured carbon underground for no other purpose than to keep it out of the atmosphere. Smaller amounts are available for projects that use captured CO2 to nudge more oil out of the ground, also known as “enhanced oil recovery,” or if they use the CO2 in products like cement.
Under the Senate proposal, all carbon sequestration projects, no matter the nature of the carbon storage, would qualify for the same amount.
The biggest clean energy killer in the House-passed bill was a strict sourcing rule for the tax credits that would disqualify projects that use any component, subcomponent or mineral from China. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last week, the rules appeared “unworkable” to many companies because they seemingly disqualified projects even if they used a relatively small amount of an otherwise irrelevant Chinese-sourced material — such as a spare bolt or a gram of steel.
Under the House bill, manufacturers would also not be allowed to license a Chinese company’s technology. This measure appeared to directly target Ford, which has proposed manufacturing electric vehicle batteries using technology licensed from the Chinese firm CATL, one of the world’s best producers of EV batteries.
The Senate proposal changes the House provision by adding a complicated new set of definitions about what might qualify as a federal entity of concern. It also introduces a new “safe harbor” formula describing the amount of Chinese-sourced material that can keep a project from receiving a tax credit. We’re still figuring out how these new rules work together, and we’ll update this article as we understand them better.
The House bill also would have severely curtailed a crucial component of the tax credit program called transferability, which allowed developers that couldn’t take full advantage of the subsidies to sell their credits for cash to other companies. The text stripped this option from the tax credits for clean manufacturing (45X), carbon sequestration (45Q), and clean fuels (45Z) beginning in 2028. Without transferability, most carbon sequestration projects will struggle to pencil out, my colleague Katie Brigham reported.
The Senate proposal would restore transferability for the duration of all remaining tax credits.
But it throws another wrench in plans to scale up nuclear, geothermal, and other large capital-intensive projects, because it restricts zero-carbon power plants’ ability to use modified accelerated cost recovery to fund their projects.
Trump just quasi-nationalized U.S. Steel. That could help climate policy later.
The government is getting into the steel business. The deal between Japan’s Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel, long held off by the Biden administration due to national security and economic concerns, may finally happen, and the government will have a seat at the table. And some progressives are smarting over the fact that a Republican did it first.
On Friday, Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel announced “that President Trump has approved the Companies’ historic partnership,” which would include $11 billion in new investments and “a Golden Share to be issued to the U.S. Government” as well as “commitments” that include “domestic production” and “trade matters.”
The New York Times reported that this “Golden Share” would give the president, including Trump’s successors, the ability to appoint or veto some of the company’s directors, and require the government to sign off on a wide range of corporate decisions, like moving production overseas or idling or closing plants or the procurement of raw materials.
The Trump administration will likely use its oversight to encourage domestic production of steel, in tandem with its tariffs on steel imports. The unique arrangement “will massively expand access to domestically produced steel,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick wrote on X.
While neither the administration nor the two companies involved in the deal have mentioned decarbonizing steel — and in fact existing steel decarbonization programs have floundered in the first months of the Trump’s second term — it is this government oversight of steel production that could, with a different administration, help steer the steel industry into greener pastures.
A future president could wield a golden share to encourage or require the significant capital investments necessary to decarbonize some of U.S. Steel’s production, investments that the Biden administration had trouble catalyzing even with direct government financial support.
And considering that steel makes up for some 7% of global emissions, decarbonization is a necessary — if costly — step to substantially reducing global emissions.
“It’s honestly embarrassing that Republicans beat us to actually implementing a golden share or something like it,” Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for the National Economic Council in the Biden White House, told me.
When the steel giant Cleveland Cliffs first hinted that it would not go forward with $500 million worth of federal grants to help build a hydrogen-powered mill, it cited “fears that there won’t be buyers for the lower-carbon product,” thanks to a 40% price gap with traditional steel, Ilmi Granoff wrote for Heatmap., This tracked what steel producers and buyers were telling the Biden administration as it tried to convene the industry to see what it needed to go green.
“The largest issue by far in advancing green steel production in the U.S. is demand. It’s still not price competitive and not worth capital investment upgrades, given where the market is right now and without stable demand from customers who are going to pay a premium for the product,” Jacquez said. “There’s no case to make to shareholders for why you’re investing.”
When the Roosevelt Institute looked at barriers to transition to clean steel, specifically a Cleveland-Cliffs project, among familiar community concerns like what it would mean for steel employment, there was “corporate inertia and focus on short-term shareholder value over long-term public value and competitiveness.”
While the Trump administration sees shareholder demands leading to insufficient domestic production of any steel, a future administration could be a counterweight to investors not wanting to make green steel investments.
Shareholder reticence is a “huge obstacle,” one of the report’s authors Isabel Estevez, co-executive director of the industrial policy think tank I3T, told me.
“Of course investors are not going to green light investments that don’t produce the same returns as doing nothing or doing something else would do,” Jacquez said.
And when green steel projects have gotten canceled, in the U.S. and abroad, it’s been dismal shareholder returns that are often the explicit or implicit justification, as well as the high cost of producing green hydrogen necessary to fuel green steel operations. “We are not only pushing the boundaries of what is technologically feasible with this project. We are also currently pushing the boundaries of economic viability. Or, as it stands today: beyond it,” the chief executive of ThyssenKrupp told the North Rhine-Westphalia parliament, according to Hydrogen Insight.
And the resulting Trump administration retrenchment from the Biden administration’s climate policy has made the environment even less friendly for green steel.
Earlier this month Cleveland-Cliffs scrapped the hydrogen-fuel steel project and said instead it would try to extend its existing coal-fueled blast furnace. And the Swedish company SSAB earlier this year withdrew from a prospective project in Mississippi.
Would these outcomes be any different with a “golden share”? When the Roosevelt Institute looked at steel decarbonization even full-on nationalization was considered as one of the “sticks” that could push along decarbonization (many steel companies globally are either state-owned or have some state investment). The golden share, at least as reported, will seem to put the government in the driver’s seat of a major player of the steel industry, while still maintaining its private ownership structure.
“Assuming the nature of the golden share allows the public sector to make certain requirements about the way that profits are used, it could be very valuable for encouraging U.S. Steel to use their profits to make important investments,” Estevez told me.