You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
On ominous forecasts, Ford’s hybrid pivot, and Disney’s Autopia ride
Current conditions: Nearly 4,000 schools in the Philippines have suspended in-person classes due to extreme heat • Large parts of the central and southern High Plains are under red flag fire warnings • It will be 57 degrees Fahrenheit and rainy in Baltimore today for President Biden’s visit to the site of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.
The coastal United States and Caribbean should prepare for an “extremely active” 2024 hurricane season. That’s the message from Colorado State University researchers, who yesterday released their preseason extended range forecast for the region. They estimate there will be more named hurricanes than usual (11 compared with the 30-year average of 7.2) and that five of them could be major storms. There’s an above-normal chance (62% compared with 43% historical averages) that at least one of these major hurricanes will make landfall somewhere along the continental U.S. coastline. While these are just predictions, the team says they are more confident than in past years in their forecast “given how hurricane-favorable the large-scale conditions appear to be.”
NOAA forecast for El Niño and La Niña. Black arrow indicates the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season.CSU
They’re referring to two factors: Unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic, and an expected transition out of El Niño and into La Niña. Warmer waters provide more energy for storms, and La Niña “typically increases Atlantic hurricane activity through decreases in vertical wind shear.” Ocean temperatures last year were the hottest ever recorded, driven by both El Niño and climate change from burning fossil fuels. “A key area of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes form is already abnormally warm,” explainedThe New York Times, “much warmer than an ideal swimming pool temperature of about 80 degrees and on the cusp of feeling more like warm bathtub water.” The oceans have absorbed 90% of the excessive heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.
Ford is delaying production of its next-generation electric pickup and its long-awaited three-row electric SUV, with the vehicles now set to be available in 2026 and 2027, respectively. In the near-term, the company plans to follow market trends by focusing on hybrids. Sales of hybrids climbed last quarter by 45% in the U.S., compared with 2.7% growth in sales for EVs. And more than half of the Ford Maverick compact pickup trucks sold last quarter had conventional hybrid engines, “a sign of how rapidly hybrids and plug-in hybrids are ascending in the American car market,” says Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer. Ford plans to offer hybrid versions of its entire gas-powered lineup in North America by 2030. “We are committed to scaling a profitable EV business, using capital wisely and bringing to market the right gas, hybrid and fully electric vehicles at the right time,” said Ford president and CEO Jim Farley.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
A Boston-based battery startup called Alsym Energy has raised $78 million in a new funding round. The company has created a rechargeable battery that’s lithium- and cobalt-free, which means it’s less flammable and not as vulnerable to supply shortages. As VentureBeatexplained: “When it comes to batteries, we’ve put all our eggs in one basket. Non-lithium batteries help diversify the global battery mix so that lithium-ion supply chain disruptions or pricing volatility don’t derail the clean energy transition.” The company will use the new funds to hire more people and build production lines to provide samples to customers, according toTechCrunch.
Germany’s transport minister dismissed reports that the country’s autobahn may introduce speed limits in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is unique among industrialized countries in that many of its highways have no nationwide speed limits. Studies suggest lowering top speeds to 75mph could cut 6.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year. Germany aims to become carbon neutral by 2045, but the country’s transport sector has been the slowest to cut emissions, reported Reuters. Support for speed limits has been growing, even though Transport Minister Volker Wissing said “people don’t want that,” according toPolitico.
Disneyland’s Autopia ride is ditching its gas-powered cars and going electric as part of its plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. The attraction, which lets visitors drive around a miniature motorway in small cars, is located at Disneyland’s Tomorrowland in Anaheim, California. When Tomorrowland opened in 1955, Walt Disney called it “a step into the future, with predictions of constructive things to come.” But Autopia’s existing cars are loud and produce noxious fumes, prompting complaints from visitors and climate activists alike. This week Disney announced it will swap them out for electric versions “in the next few years,” though it didn’t say whether the new cars would be fully electric or hybrid. Bob Gurr, who helped Walt design Tomorrowland in the ‘50s, told the Los Angeles Times it’s time to “get rid of those God-awful gasoline fumes.”
“The transition to all-electric buildings is so well underway that legal obstacles thrown up by the fossil fuel industry and its allies won’t be enough to stop it.” –The LA Times editorial board says Berkeley’s decision to abandon its natural gas ban is just a “bump in the road.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
When Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, millions of people participated in hundreds of marches around the country and the world to demonstrate their commitment in the new cause of resistance. No such large-scale protests are materializing for next January 20; those who hoped Trump would lose the presidential election now seem more demoralized than defiant.
That reaction is understandable. After a period of progress and optimism about the future, and even as the climate crisis grows more dire, we are in for a difficult four years. As Jesse Jenkins wrote just after the election, the outcome “dealt a devastating blow to U.S. efforts to cut climate-warming pollution.”
But for those feeling despair, there is a way forward: Embrace the fight. Sometimes politics is about compromise, sometimes it’s about patience, and sometimes it’s about righteous fury. This time, fury may be just what’s called for.
There’s no doubt that some very bad vibrations will emanate from Washington. Trump is arriving with the Project 2025 blueprint in hand, ready to undermine climate progress in every corner of government. Key agencies will be led by a veritable murderer’s row of fossil fuel enthusiasts, from the fracking executive who will helm the Department of Energy to the “all-of-the-above” enthusiast who will lead both the Department of the Interior and the new National Energy Council, the goal of which is to achieve what Trump calls, in all caps, “ENERGY DOMINANCE.”
As far as Trump is concerned, “dominance” comes not from wimpy renewables but from pounding holes in the ground and burning what comes out of them, the manly pursuit of those whose hearts beat faster at the thought of America’s foes kneeling in submission before our virile power. And it comes from reversing whatever Joe Biden did, not because Trump necessarily cares whether consumers get subsidies to buy heat pumps, but because undoing his predecessor’s legacy shows that Trump is a winner and everyone else is a loser.
As much as some would like us to believe that by giving Trump one of the narrowest presidential victories in history the voters were explicitly rejecting the Biden administration’s climate policies in favor of Trump’s fossil fuel agenda, there is no evidence that’s true. As much as we would have liked it to be otherwise, most polls showed climate change ranking low when people were asked what decided their vote. Indeed, the most persuasive explanation for the election outcome is that all over the world, voters have turned out whichever party was in power when the wave of post-pandemic inflation hit; Kamala Harris nearly overcame that anti-incumbent wave, but wasn’t able to in the end.
So while Trump may not have much of a “mandate” in general, he certainly doesn’t have one to reverse the progress the country has made on climate. That means the politics of opposing the administration’s climate efforts are in advocates’ favor. At the very least, there is plenty of room to persuade the public that the Trump administration is doing something awful on climate.
Embracing the fight will mean acknowledging that while bipartisanship is sometimes an effective tool, it isn’t an end in itself. Republicans should certainly be welcomed as allies whenever they want to join in defending climate progress or pushing back on efforts to undermine it, but the days when Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich would film an ad together pledging their commitment to address climate change are long behind us. It would be nice if there was a consensus on the need to transition off of fossil fuels, but there isn’t. Instead, there’s a climate assault on its way, and while appeals to the self-interest of some Republicans (such as those politicians whose districts are benefiting enormously from clean energy investments) are possible, a battle is more likely.
That isn’t a bad thing. Conflicts are energizing — they clarify stakes, focus media attention, and motivate people to get involved. And just as many climate advocates realized that warnings of doom (even accurate ones) are often less effective than an optimistic vision of a future of abundance, we should also understand that one of the most powerful arguments in politics is that someone is trying to take something away from you. Which is exactly what Trump will likely do, and when it happens, people ought to be mad about it.
This fight will take place both in Washington and between the Trump administration on one side and states and cities on the other. Ambitious Democrats including Governor Gavin Newsom of California are looking for ways to resist the new Trump administration, not only on substantive grounds but also because standing up to Trump is good politics for them. When they do so on climate policy (as Newsom did when he proposed that his state offer tax credits for electric vehicles if Republicans eliminate the ones provided for in the Inflation Reduction Act), it will highlight climate actions Trump is taking that might otherwise have been overlooked.
In many ways, the climate story of the past few years has been an encouraging one — the passage of the IRA (the most consequential climate law ever), steadily dropping prices for renewables, innovations in energy and carbon mitigation, and more. The next few years will be characterized by conflict.
That may not be what climate advocates want, but it’s unavoidable. And no outcome is predetermined. November 5 altered the politics of climate change, but it didn’t end them; there will be plenty of opportunities to create controversies, exploit political opportunities, and get voters justifiably angry. Fighting — thoughtfully, with careful planning and energy — will be more important than ever.
On important court hearings, plastic pollution, and solar geoengineering
Current conditions: A city in southeastern India recorded its heaviest 24-hour rainfall in three decades when Cyclone Fengal slammed the region and left 19 dead • Storm Bora flooded the Greek island of Rhodes over the weekend • The Great Lakes and surrounding states are seeing their first major lake effect snow event of the season.
The International Court of Justice – also known as the World Court – today will start hearing from 99 countries and dozens of organizations on what legal obligations rich countries should have in fighting climate change and helping vulnerable nations recover and adapt. Crucially, the judges will also ponder potential consequences for countries’ actions (or lack thereof) that have caused climate harm. Major oil producers and greenhouse gas emitters, as well as OPEC, will also speak at the hearings. The case is the largest in the history of the top U.N. court. An advisory opinion from the World Court would not be binding, but the outcome “could serve as the basis for other legal actions, including domestic lawsuits,” The Associated Pressreported. The hearings will run for two weeks and a decision is due in 2025.
Negotiators from more than 170 countries failed to come to an agreement about how to limit the unrelenting flow of plastic pollution. The week-long U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting in South Korea was the fifth such summit so far and was to be the last, but because it ended without a deal, leaders decided to kick the can down the road and return for more talks at an undetermined later date. The tensions at this meeting weren’t that different from those hampering the COP climate talks on fossil fuel use, with major oil-producing nations blocking meaningful progress. In this case, while more than 100 countries called for a binding treaty to reduce plastic production, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others opposed this idea and instead favored a voluntary treaty aimed at improving waste management. The U.S signalled support for the idea of reducing plastic pollution but opposed mandatory production caps. Most plastics are made from fossil fuels, and the U.S. is one of the most prolific producers of plastic waste.
And speaking of U.N. summits, there’s another (yes, another!) kicking off today. The convention on combating desertification (UNCCD), taking place in Saudi Arabia, focuses on stopping land degradation – the declining health of the world’s soil and the loss of landscapes through desertification and drought. A recent study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that land degradation already affects 15 million square kilometers (about 5.7 million square miles) – an area nearly the size of Russia – and this is expanding by 1 million square miles every year. The report warned this degradation is threatening Earth’s ability to sustain life, and called for “an urgent course correction for how the world grows food and uses land.” Fixing the problem will be costly. One of the UNCCD’s lead negotiators put it at $2.6 trillion by 2030, or about $1 billion per day over the next five years, much of which will need to come from the private sector. The talks will run through December 13.
Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares abruptly stepped down yesterday. The carmaker is the fifth-largest by volume, and owns brands including Dodge, Jeep, Chrysler, Ram, and Peugeot. Sales slumped this year, particularly in North America (deliveries were down 18% in the first half of the year), and in September the company issued a profit warning on its 2024 results. Recent analysis from CNBC chalked the struggles up to stale inventory, high prices, and low vehicle quality. “The whole discussion on Stellantis has basically collapsed,” said Daniel Roeska, managing director at global investment firm Bernstein. “We’re not talking about free cash flows. We’re not talking about long-term EV strategy. … We’re only talking about how much will it cost the company to get rid of the U.S. inventory.”
In case you missed it over the long weekend: The U.S. is building an alert system that looks for signs that other nations are engaging in solar geoengineering to cool the planet, according toThe New York Times. Using high-altitude balloons, government agencies including NOAA, NASA, and the Department of Energy are monitoring atmospheric aerosols across the world in case there is a sudden increase that could indicate an effort to dim the sun. Tampering with the Earth’s atmosphere in this way could quickly bring temperatures down, but the broader effects of such an experiment on global systems is unknown, and scientists warn it could have devastating unintended consequences. The U.S. is still developing this alert system, which won’t be fully operational for years, “but is on the leading edge,” the Times said.
As early as next year, China could account for more than half of the world’s EV fleet.
His new book, Terrible Beauty, argues that “fighting losing battles is a worthy cause.”
When I scheduled this interview with Auden Schendler back in August, I’d picked what at the time felt like an arbitrary time closer to his book’s publication date. It wasn’t until much later that I realized we’d agreed to speak exactly one week after the results of the U.S. presidential election.
Schendler, of course, didn’t write Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul knowing that President Trump would win reelection, but his book feels all the more vital given the new context of climate policy in America.
Terrible Beauty is a memoir, but it also functions as a practical roadmap to attaining climate consciousness, both for companies and for consumers — an unusual blend. In it, Schendler draws on his more than two decades of sustainability work at the Aspen Skiing Company, which owns one of the most iconic ski resorts in the world, to urge by example that we need to get uncomfortable with the big upheavals necessary to combat climate change. The modern environmental movement has failed, he argues, by focusing on the kinds of small-scale changes that have businesses touting flawed carbon credit programs and paper straws — pursuits that are complicit with fossil fuel interests.
Schendler insists that instead, we should be swinging for the fences: Companies that are serious about climate and sustainability ought to use their lobbying powers and legal teams to put pressure on the government, and parents who want a better future for their children should be getting involved in local politics, no experience required. It might be lead to awkward conversations at the water cooler or in the cereal aisle — what Schendler calls the “supermarket problem” — but when everything is at stake, you have to try, even if it means losing.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you think the stakes of your book have changed between when you began writing it and now, when it’s finally hitting shelves?
On one hand, the stakes have changed because it’s even harder to get to the climate fix than before. A major theme of the book is the idea that we’re not playing a uniquely American game of winning and losing; we’re involved in a practice and trying to make things better. We’re not going to “solve” climate change. We’ve already, you could argue, failed because it’s beyond 1.5 [degrees] Celsius warming. The stakes have changed, but the methodology is the same — and possibly more important now because we are in a long struggle that we might not see the end of in our lifetime.
Something I’ve been hearing since the election is that climate advocates need to play small ball during the Trump administration — keep moving progress forward, even in inches. This is an idea you grapple with quite directly in the book. From your perspective, what is the highest-value target an average person can take on?
To be clear, I’m not advocating for small ball — my book is a critique of modern environmentalism going all-in on small ball. It didn’t work, and that’s not surprising.
Historically, we say, I care about climate and I'm going to plug in on all the things everyone has said I’m supposed to do: recycle, drive a Prius, insulate my house, take the blame for the problem myself. And what I’m saying in Terrible Beauty is, all that hasn’t worked, and it’s actually complicit with a fossil fuel economy.
The thing you need to do is get a six-pack of beer and say, Where am I powerful? What is my power? When people do that, people who don’t appear to have power show that they do. Greta Thunberg is a great example because she was just a high school girl, and look what she did. But if you’re a business, your power is different than you think it is — it’s not cutting your carbon footprint and buying offsets. It’s wielding political power.
I’m asking people to become citizens. Being a citizen is difficult — it’s messy, it’s tricky, you get in trouble.
If somebody wants to get involved interacting with their local government, how do they get past the discomfort of what you call the supermarket problem?
The supermarket problem is one of my favorite illustrations: It’s that if a person is given a choice between being a material part of saving civilization — speaking out publicly on climate, that’s one side of the balance — then you’re going to have a really awkward encounter in the cereal aisle in the supermarket with someone who disagrees with you. Most people will say, Yeah, I really do want to save civilization, but I’d rather not have that awkward encounter.
I don’t think that’s actually the problem in public office. I think what keeps people out is the perception that they don’t know enough — that there’s some secret to being a town council person. Speaking as an ex-town council person, we had no skills at all. It was shocking how bottom of the barrel we were. There’s this mystique, and people have to get over it. The United States was created to enable citizens to govern the country, and so as a citizen, you have an obligation. People shouldn’t be scared off by that.
What is your suggestion for someone who has a corporate sustainability role and reads your book and feels inspired to pursue meaningful, large-scale change, but then runs into resistance or skepticism? How do you get the bigwigs on your side?
My experience was years and years of spoon feeding, and spoon feeding in a way that is not righteous. One approach would be, Hey, I’ve been doing these carbon footprints for five years. Obviously, we care about climate. Have we talked to the Government Affairs Department about how this company can wield power?
You have to become a trusted employee by doing your work well. Corporations are made up of human beings that have great loves and epic tragedies and they care about the world. You have to think that if you bring a reasonable offer to do something next level — and by the way, it also helps the brand — then you’re going to get some traction. Another message of the book is, you might not win, but you try again. And you try again. You try again.
Like what you’ve done with including an appendix on how to sue ExxonMobil. You couldn’t put that lawsuit into motion at Aspen Skiing Company, but now you’ve put it out into the world for someone else to try.
Right. The idea is that fighting losing battles is a worthy cause. That is how humans make progress, whether it’s a fight or an invention or a business model. You try, and it doesn’t work, and then the next person learns from your mistakes and tries, and then the next and the next. And this was true of all the great movements, like civil rights. It was a series of attempts and a series of bad losses over many, many years, and then we won more and more and more.
What, if anything, do you think corporations owe the environment?
One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is that, historically, corporations have opposed regulations. The reality I think we’re coming into is that business is starting to say, Oh my gosh, climate actually is threatening us. It’s threatening our supply chain, our factories, our customers, everything. I’m inclined to think that businesses will start to say, actually, we need to fix this problem because it’s getting worse and worse.
What does business owe the environment? There is a long history of thought and writing that says the source of all wealth comes from the environment. I think the real question is, is business capable of acknowledging that? Can we count on business as designed to help us solve these problems?
My answer is that we don’t have a lot of tools for climate. We have the vote, we have the legal system, we have NGOs, we have government, we have faith groups, we have philanthropy. Business is pretty powerful. We should at least try to use this lever versus just saying, huh, we can’t do it.
The Aspen Skiing Company, as you acknowledge, often ends up serving the kind of clientele who disproportionately contribute to carbon emissions. How do you square that with the work that you do? Why is corporate sustainability at a luxury level still — or perhaps especially — important?
There are two ways to look at that question, which is ultimately an accusation of hypocrisy. I think one response is, if we are trying to wield power and drive change, where are the powerful people? They’re right here. Those are the rich people spraying champagne on each other. If you said, We’re just going to change our light bulbs and reduce our carbon footprint, then you’d be missing the opportunity to access power. So from one perspective, we have the obligation to see if we can lean on those people and get them conscripted into the movement. I would accept criticism that said, you’re not doing that well enough. That’s fair, but we should be trying.
But then the second piece of that is this: Should they — or we — be guilty for using fossil fuels? The short answer to that is that American citizens asked for the affordably provided services that energy gives us: mobility, heat, cold beer, hot showers. We didn’t say, can you provide that in a way that will destroy civilization? We shouldn’t feel guilty for living in a fossil fuel system we didn’t create.