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Current conditions: A freak hail storm hit Abu Dhabi • Beaches in Trinidad and Tobago are black after a massive oil spill • It will be another wet week in California.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Study: Many migratory species face extinction
One in five migratory species are at risk of extinction, and humans are mostly to blame, according to a grim new United Nations report. The State of the World’s MIgratory Species report from the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (CMS) is the first to study the many creatures – from elephants to butterflies to birds – that travel thousands of miles every year to breed, eat, or find new climates. The report examined 1,189 of these species and found some 44% are in population decline. Perhaps the most shocking takeaway is the dire state of the world’s migratory fish species: Ninety-seven percent are facing extinction. Migratory reptiles are also in trouble, with 70% threatened. Overexploitation and habitat loss due to human activity are the largest pressures contributing to these losses. “These animals are, first and foremost, part of the ecosystems where they’re found,” CMS executive secretary Amy Fraenkel told CNN. “And we have a lot of evidence showing that if you remove these species, if they decline, it will have impacts on the ecosystems where they’re found, and not in a positive way.” Protecting migrating animals can be a challenge because it requires cross-border cooperation.
2. Another big U.S. oil merger will create Permian Basin drilling giant
Diamondback Energy announced a $26 billion deal to buy Endeavor Energy Resources, the largest private oil company in America’s biggest oil field, the Permian Basin. The deal catapults Diamondback to the third spot on the list of the region’s largest oil and gas producers. This is “the latest in a flurry of large-scale merger and acquisition activity in the U.S. shale patch as companies look to snap up the best remaining drilling acreage,” explained the Financial Times. Last year saw similar acquisitions targeting the region by ExxonMobil and Chevron. Together Diamondback and Endeavor will pump the equivalent of 816,000 barrels of oil per day, Reutersreported.
3. Study raises new concerns about ocean current tipping point
A new study suggests the “conveyor belt” of Atlantic Ocean currents that sends warm water north and cold water south is in danger of collapse. Climate researchers have long worried that global warming could someday cause the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to slow or stop. This would trigger major shifts in regional climates and devastate ecosystems, but such an event has always been hard to predict, and most forecasts saw it occuring centuries in the future, if at all. For this new study, researchers used a supercomputer to run through potential warming scenarios and were able to trigger a collapse in the model AMOC, confirming there is indeed a point at which the system breaks down. While the team couldn’t pinpoint when this collapse could happen, they say the findings suggest “we are moving in the direction of the tipping point.” If AMOC were to shut down, parts of Europe, North America, and Asia could see temperatures drop, the southern hemisphere could warm, and Atlantic sea levels could rise by a meter, all within a short timespan that would make adaptation almost impossible, The Guardianreported.
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4. John Deere is going electric
Tractor company John Deere plans to start making and selling fully electric farm and construction equipment by 2026, Yale Climate Connections reported. The company said its electric lineup will give farmers more flexibility and help them lower costs. “They can manage yield and plant health on a more frequent basis; enabled by the cost of that pass being so low. They are no longer exposed to fuel costs. Producers can focus on the health of the plants/animals, and truly optimize the material inputs such as fertilizers, chemicals, and feeds.” It mentions reduced CO2 emissions, too, but only briefly, suggesting John Deere thinks the key to encouraging farmers to swap out their legacy equipment is to focus on operational improvements rather than environmental benefits.
5. Twisters trailer debuts
The first trailer for the disaster film Twisters debuted during the Super Bowl last night. The film, which hits theaters in July, isn’t a remake of the 1996 Twister, but more of a follow up. It promises to be just as nightmare-inducing, especially given how extreme weather has become more common in the years since the first film was released. Back in ‘96, “‘climate change’ didn’t quite carry the very real, very doom-laden weight that it does now,” wrote Cheryl Eddy at Gizmodo. “Is Twisters’ apocalyptic weather even in the realm of science fiction anymore?”
THE KICKER
California is considering introducing an
electric bike license for riders who do not already have a regular driver’s license. It would require e-bike drivers to take a course, pass a test, and get a state ID.
Current conditions: Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo is blanketed in a layer of toxic smog • Temperatures in Perth, in Western Australia, could hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It is cloudy in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are scrambling to prevent a government shutdown.
THE TOP FIVE
1. NOAA might have to change its weather models
The weather has gotten so weird that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding internal talks about how to adjust its models to produce more accurate forecasts, the Financial Timesreported. Current models are based on temperature swings observed over one part of the Pacific Ocean that have for years correlated consistently with specific weather phenomena across the globe, but climate change seems to be disrupting that cause and effect pattern, making it harder to predict things like La Niña and El Niño. Many forecasters had expected La Niña to appear by now and help cool things down, but that has yet to happen. “It’s concerning when this region we’ve studied and written all these papers on is not related to all the impacts you’d see with [La Niña],” NOAA’s Michelle L’Heureux told the FT. “That’s when you start going ‘uh-oh’ there may be an issue here we need to resolve.”
2. A quick roundup of DOE updates
There is quite a lot of news coming out of the Department of Energy as the year (and the Biden administration) comes to an end. A few recent updates:
The DOE is investing $25 million across 11 domestic next-generation battery projects. Here is the full list of projects.
Toyota will get $4.5 million in DOE funding to develop a sort of industry blueprint for circular EV battery supply chains. The main focus is on building an automated process for disassembling battery packs, assessing their contents, and then reusing them. “These innovations envision a scenario where end-of-life lithium-ion batteries are systematically evaluated, classified, and reused prior to being considered for recycling,” Toyota said in a press release.
And in case you missed it, the DOE’s Loan Program Office this week closed its $9.63 billion loan to Ford’s EV battery joint venture BlueOval SK. The money will go toward building up to three new battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky.
3. Walmart to miss emissions targets
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, does not expect to meet its 2025 or 2030 emissions targets, and is putting the blame on policy, infrastructure, and technology limitations. The company previously pledged to cut its emissions by 35% by next year, and 65% by the end of the decade. Emissions in 2023 were up 4% year-over-year.
Walmart
“While we continue to work toward our aspirational target of zero operational emissions by 2040, progress will not be linear … and depends not only on our own initiatives but also on factors beyond our control,” Walmart’s statement said. “These factors include energy policy and infrastructure in Walmart markets around the world, availability of more cost-effective low-GWP refrigeration and HVAC solutions, and timely emergence of cost-effective technologies for low-carbon heavy tractor transportation (which does not appear likely until the 2030s).”
4. BlackRock slashes value of renewable fund
BlackRock yesterday said it is writing down the value of its Global Renewable Power Fund III following the failure of Northvolt and SolarZero, two companies the fund had invested in. Its net internal rate of return was -0.3% at the end of the third quarter, way down from 11.5% in the second quarter, according toBloomberg. Sectors like EV charging, transmission, and renewable energy generation and storage have been “particularly challenged,” executives said, and some other renewables companies in the portfolio have yet to get in the black, meaning their valuations may be “more subjective and sensitive to evolving dynamics in the industry.”
5. Climate change threatens flies more than bees
Flies may be more vulnerable to climate change than bees are, according to a new study published in the Journal of Melittology. The fly haters among us might shrug at the finding, but the researchers insist flies are essential pollinators that help bolster ecosystem biodiversity and agriculture. “It’s time we gave flies some more recognition for their role as pollinators,” said lead author Margarita López-Uribe, who is the Lorenzo Langstroth Early Career Associate Professor of Entomology at Penn State. The study found bees can tolerate higher temperatures than flies, so flies are at greater risk of decline as global temperatures rise. “In alpine and subarctic environments, flies are the primary pollinator,” López-Uribe said. “This study shows us that we have entire regions that could lose their primary pollinator as the climate warms, which could be catastrophic for those ecosystems.”
Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.
Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”
I have a slightly different take on the situation, though — that 2024 was actuallyfull of climate movies, and, I’d argue, that they’re getting much closer to the kinds of stories a climate-concerned individual should want on screen.
That’s because for the most part, when movies and TV shows have tackled the topic of climate change in the past, it’s been with the sort of “simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing” that The New Yorker’s Richard Brody identified in 2022’s Don’t Look Up, the Adam McKay satire that became the primary touchpoint for scripted climate stories. At least it was kind of funny: More overt climate stories like last year’s Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ show in which Meryl Streep voices a whale, are so self-righteous as to be unwatchable (not to mention, no fun).
But what if we widened our lens and weren’t so prescriptive? Then maybe Furiosa, this spring’s Mad Max prequel, becomes a climate change movie. The film is set during a “near future” ecological collapse, and it certainly makes you think about water scarcity and our overreliance on a finite extracted resource — but it also makes you think about how badass the Octoboss’ kite is. The same goes for Dune: Part Two, which made over $82 million in its opening weekend and is also a recognizable environmental allegory featuring some cool worms. Even Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a flop that most people have already memory-holed, revisitedThe Day After Tomorrow’s question of, “What if New York City got really, really, really cold?”
Two 2024 animated films with climate themes could even compete against each other at the Academy Awards next year. Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, one of the centerpiece films at this fall’s inaugural Climate Film Festival, is set in a world where sea levels have risen to submerge the Golden Gate Bridge, and it impresses on its audience the importance of protecting the natural world. And in Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, one of my favorite films of the year, a cat must band together with other animals to survive a flood.
Flow also raises the question of whether a project can unintentionally be a climate movie. Zilbalodis told me that making a point about environmental catastrophe wasn’t his intention — “I can’t really start with the message, I have to start with the character,” he said — and to him, the water is a visual metaphor in an allegory about overcoming your fears.
But watching the movie in a year when more than a thousand people worldwide have died in floods, and with images of inundated towns in North Carolina still fresh in mind, it’s actually climate change itself that makes one watch Flow as a movie about climate change. (I’m not the only one with this interpretation, either: Zilbalodis told me he’d been asked by one young audience member if the flood depicted in his film is “the future.”)
Perhaps this is how we should also consider Chung’s comments about Twisters. While nobody in the film says the words “climate change” or “global warming,” the characters note that storms are becoming exceptional — “we've never seen tornadoes like this before,” one says. Despite the director’s stated intention not to make the movie “about” climate change, it becomes a climate movie by virtue of what its audiences have experienced in their own lives.
Still, there’s that niggling question: Do movies like these, which approach climate themes slant-wise, really count? To help me decide, I turned to Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that encourages environmental awareness both on set and on screen. He told me that to qualify something as a “climate” movie or TV show, some research groups look to see if climate change exists in the world of the story or whether the characters acknowledge it. Other groups consider climate in tiers, such as whether a project has a climate premise, theme, or simply a moment.
The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, however, has no hard rules. “We want to make sure that we support creatives in integrating these stories in whatever way works for them,” Read told me.
Read also confirmed my belief that there seemed to be an uptick in movies this year that were “not about climate change but still deal with things that feel very climate-related, like resource extraction.” There was even more progress on this front in television, he pointed out: True Detective: Night Country wove in themes of environmentalism, pollution, mining, and Indigenous stewardship; the Max comedy Hacks featured an episode about climate change this season; and Industry involved a storyline about taking a clean energy company public, with some of the characters even attending COP. Even Doctor Odyssey, a cruise ship medical drama that airs on USA, worked climate change into its script, albeit in ridiculous ways. (Also worth mentioning: The Netflix dating show Love is Blind cast Taylor Krause, who works on decarbonizing heavy industry at RMI.)
We can certainly do more. As many critics before me have written, it’s still important to draw a connection between things like environmental catastrophes and the real-world human causes of global warming. But the difference between something being “a climate movie” and propaganda — however true its message, or however well-intentioned — is thin. Besides, no one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded; we want to be moved and distracted and entertained.
I’ve done my fair share of complaining over the past few years about how climate storytelling needs to grow up. But lately I’ve been coming around to the idea that it’s not the words “climate change” appearing in a script that we need to be so focused on. As 2024’s slate of films has proven to me — or, perhaps, as this year’s extreme weather events have thrown into relief — there are climate movies everywhere.
It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.
When those talks died, they also killed a separate deal over permitting struck earlier this year between Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. That deal, as I detailed last week, would have loosened some federal rules around oil and gas drilling in exchange for a new, quasi-mandatory scheme to build huge amounts of long-distance transmission.
Rest in peace, I suppose. Even if lawmakers could not agree on NEPA changes, I think Republicans made a mistake by not moving forward with the Manchin-Barrasso deal. (I still believe that the standalone deal could have passed the Senate and the House if put to a vote.) At this point, I do not think we will see another shot at bipartisan permitting reform until at least late 2026, when the federal highway law will need fresh funding.
But it is difficult to get too upset about this failure because larger mistakes have since compounded the initial one. On Wednesday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan deal to fund the government — which is, after all, a much more fundamental task of governance than rewriting some federal permitting laws — fell apart, seemingly because Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided they didn’t like it. If I can indulge in the subjunctive for a moment: That breakdown might have likely killed any potential permitting deal, too. So even in a world where lawmakers somehow did strike a deal earlier this week, it might already be dead. (As I write this, the House GOP has reportedly reached a new deal to fund the government through March, which has weakened or removed provisions governing pharmacy benefit managers and limiting American investments in China.)
The facile reading of this situation is that Republicans now hold the advantage. The Trump administration will soon be able to implement some of the fossil fuel provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso deal through the administrative state. Trump will likely expand onshore and offshore drilling, will lease the government’s best acreage to oil and gas companies, and will approve as many liquified natural gas export terminals as possible. His administration will do so, however, without the enhanced legal protection that the deal would have provided — and while those protections are not a must-have, especially with a friendly Supreme Court, their absence will still allow environmental groups to try to run down the clock on some of Trump’s more ambitious initiatives.
Republicans believe that they will be able to get parts of permitting reform done in a partisan reconciliation bill next year. These efforts seem quite likely to run aground, at least as long as something like the current rules governing reconciliation bills hold. I have heard some crazy proposals on this topic — what if skipping a permitting fight somehow became a revenue-raiser for the federal government? — but even they do not touch the deep structure of NEPA in the way a bipartisan compromise could. As Westerman toldPolitico’s Josh Siegel: “We need 60 votes in the Senate to get real permitting reform … People are just going to have to come to an agreement on what permitting reform is.” In any case, Manchin and the Democrats already tried to reform the permitting system via a partisan reconciliation bill and found it essentially impossible.
Even if reconciliation fails, Republicans say, they will still be in a better negotiating position next year than this year because the party will control a few more Senate votes. But will they? The GOP will just have come off a difficult fight over tax reform. Twelve or 24 months from now, demands on the country’s electricity grid are likely to be higher than they are today, and the risk of blackouts will be higher than before. The lack of a robust transmission network will hinder the ability to build a massive new AI infrastructure, as some of Trump’s tech industry backers hope. But 12 or 24 months from now, too, Democrats — furious at Trump — are not going to be in a dealmaking mood, and Republicans have relatively few ways to bring them to the table.
In any case, savvy Republicans should have realized that it is important to get supply-side economic reforms done as early in a president’s four-year term as possible. Such changes take time to filter through the system and turn into real projects and real economic activity; passing the law as early as possible means that the president’s party can enjoy them and campaign on them.
All of it starts to seem more and more familiar. When Manchin and Barrasso unveiled their compromise earlier this year, Democrats didn’t act quickly on it. They felt confident that the window for a deal wouldn’t close — and they looked forward to a potential trifecta, when they would be able to get even more done (and reject some of Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly compromises).
Democrats, I think, wound up regretting the cavalier attitude that they brought to permitting reform before Trump’s win. But now the GOP is acting the same way: It is rejecting compromises, believing that it will be able to strike a better deal on permitting issues during its forthcoming trifecta. That was a mistake when Democrats did it. I think it will be a mistake for Republicans, too.
Proportion of species classified in risk areas
Walmart
