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Psychologist Kari Leibowitz’ book How to Winter has tools to help you survive — even thrive — through a season with no glistening snow.
It is the darkest week of the year. For the lucky folks in Miami, the day still lasts a little over 10 hours; in Anchorage, it lasts less than six. In Utqiagvik, Alaska — the economic center of the North Slope’s oil operations — there is no day at all; the sun last set on Nov. 16 and won’t rise again until mid-January.
When there is no snow, that night feels even more endless. As temperatures warm around the globe, snowfall is noticeably declining, which actually makes winters in northern climates darker since snow reflects so much light. With some parts of the U.S. set to lose 10% to 20% of their snowpack per decade due to climate change, darker and rainier winters are likely in store for millions of us.
If that news fills you with horror and despair (as it does me) then I’ve got the book for you: Kari Leibowitz’s How to Winter, a guide to “harnessing your mindset to thrive on cold, dark, or difficult days.” Leibowitz is a Stanford-trained health researcher and psychologist specializing in “the winter blues.” She and I first spoke in January when she thoroughly debunked the claim that warmer winters will make people happier.
Leibowitz certainly doesn’t think the loss of snow is good news. (In addition to her mindset research, she is on the Science Alliance team at Protect Our Winters, a nonprofit that mobilizes outdoor recreators to take action on environmental issues.) But if warmer winters are a part of our reality going forward, then she also believes we should learn to adapt to them rather than merely endure them.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When we spoke in January, I was working on a piece about the common misconception that global warming and warmer winters will make people happier. Though few Americans actually look forward to darker and colder days, what do we lose when we lose winter?
We lose a lot. If you live somewhere that gets below freezing or that gets snow in the winter, that opens up a huge world of winter recreation possibilities — skiing, snowshoeing, ice skating — and also a world of beauty and fascination. Even people who don’t love winter tend to think of a White Christmas and snowy cabins when they picture a winter that they would love. Ice and frost can be really beautiful.
In my personal experience, and in the experiences of many people I’ve spoken to throughout Scandinavia, a few degrees or more below freezing is much better than a few degrees above freezing because then you get that humidity, and that cold soaks into your bones. There are a lot of places in the U.S. that are really on the border, where a few degrees makes a really big difference between a colder, snowier winter and a warmer, rainier winter. Snow also reflects light; it makes it brighter during the darkest days of the year.
I’m glad you brought that up! One of the things I learned last time we spoke was that climate change is making the world darker in the sense that snow is what reflects light in the wintertime, so warmer and drizzlier winters are potentially more difficult for us to tolerate than very cold ones. What would you recommend people who live in these transitional or rapidly changing climates do to combat the winter blues?
Working with the darkness is key wherever you live, whether it’s somewhere snowier or less snowy. In Scandinavia, you will not see big, bright overhead lights on in people’s houses during the night or the evening in the winter. It’s almost counterintuitive because you think, “Oh, it’s dark outside, let me make it as bright as possible in here.” But that creates a really strong contrast that is tiring for our eyes and our bodies.
Lower lights — using candlelight — turn the darkness into an asset. You can only eat dinner by candlelight when the sun sets early; it makes the darkness part of the vibe and it also reduces the big contrast with the outdoors. That might make it easier to get outside and do things, too, because it doesn’t look as dark out compared to inside. On a gray, rainy morning, I will light candles for 15 minutes when I eat my breakfast. In the U.S., this sort of lighting is usually reserved for special occasions, but I think making it part of the everyday is really valuable.
You also write in the book about rebranding Christmas lights as “winter lights” and leaving them up all season long.
This is something they did in Edmonton, Canada, when they were working on their winter city strategy. It kind of kills me when the Christmas lights come down in the second week of January! We have so much winter darkness left to go and we need that light. Even at home, using twinkly lights in our living rooms makes such a difference in the vibe.
You can only enjoy Christmas lights or winter lights when it’s dark out, and acknowledging that darkness brings something special also helps reframe our feelings about winter.
You wrote this book because many people struggle with the winter. But as I was reading it, I was thinking about how much I dread summer and the inescapable heat of August. Do you think the mindset strategies you suggest for winter could apply to “summering” as well?
They are really different challenges. My theory about winter is that the cold is not as big a problem as the darkness. There is research that backs this up: Evidence shows that light makes us feel awake and that it makes us feel good, and darkness makes us feel tired and can have a mild depressant effect. But the larger message of the book, and the larger approach to the winter mindset, is to find the opportunity in the challenge that you’re facing. And that can help us with anything — including really hot summers.
So, what’s the opportunity? Maybe the opportunity is that you can do more things at night when the temperature is really nice; there is something really lovely about being outside at night when it’s warm! Or maybe you can spend time resting during the hottest parts of the day, like they do in places like Spain. I’ve been to other places in the Mediterranean where they have metal blackout shades that are great for sleeping and keeping it cool. We should think, “What are the opportunities here to work with the climate, to build houses differently that have better cross breezes or have atriums?” We need to work with this reality.We need to adapt.
When did you start thinking about climate change in your winter mindset work?
It really came from my experiences in the Arctic. I’d talk to people there and they would be like, “It’s raining in January. That’s very unusual.” When I was living in Norway [between 2014 and 2015], I went to Svalbard, and there was a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t do because it had been too warm. It had rained, and then the rain freezes on the mountain tops, and it snows on top of that, and then there’s avalanche risk. We were going to go to some ice caves and it wasn’t safe at that time. I was talking to people in Svalbard who were like, “Normally, this fjord freezes over, and we can snowmobile from place to place in the winter, but this year, we can’t.”
Being [in Tromsø, Norway], living there, talking to those people, and really caring about that community, and staying plugged in from afar — it’s really personal. A lot of the things that I was learning about in my research that people in Tromsø look forward to, and that make winter great, are not things that they can always count on. And I think that’s true everywhere you go.
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Current conditions: San Francisco received a record-breaking amount of rain yesterday • Madagascar has been struck by two tropical cyclones in the span of a week • Scientists are warning of an “extreme winter warming event” unfolding at the north pole.
Climate scientist James Hansen has published a new study concluding the world is on track for more than 2 degrees Celsius in warming by 2045. Hansen has been saying for some time that current climate models underestimate the rate at which global temperatures are rising. The new research, published in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, says that we have been artificially cooling the planet with aerosol pollution for years. With new shipping regulations limiting these aerosols, this cooling effect is waning and warming will ramp up rapidly – probably by about 0.2 or 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade. “Unless actions are taken to reduce global warming,” the study warns, “shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely within the next 20-30 years.”
Hansen has a long history of presenting alarming climate studies that divide the scientific community. But much of his work has proven to be remarkably prescient. In 1988 he famously warned Congress that human activity was changing the climate. In 2023, Hansen published controversial work projecting that the world would breach 1.5 degrees Celsius in warming much sooner than expected. “In the next several months,” he said, “we’re going to go well above 1.5C on a 12-month average.” Last year was indeed the first full calendar year during which the 1.5 Celsius threshold was broken. In fact the average temperature for the whole of last year was 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times. This year is already confounding scientists who were expecting things to cool down a little bit: Last month was the hottest January on record, with temperatures 1.75 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial years.
Government websites are being scrubbed of references to climate change. So far climate pages have stopped working on websites for the Departments of Defense, State, Agriculture, and Transportation. A “climate change” landing page for the White House does not load. Climate scientist David Ho noted that a page charting CO2 atmospheric trends has also been removed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website.
Meanwhile, President Trump this week nominated Neil Jacobs to lead NOAA. Jacobs was acting NOAA head in 2019 when Trump infamously used a Sharpie to draw the path of Hurricane Dorian to suggest the storm would hit Alabama, contradicting weather forecasts. NOAA backed the president’s statements, prompting an investigation that concluded Jacobs violated scientific integrity policy.
Chaos within the Trump administration has all but paralyzed environmental permitting decisions on solar and wind projects in crucial government offices, including sign-offs needed for projects on private lands, reported Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. According to an internal memo issued by the American Clean Power Association, the renewables trade association that represents the largest U.S. solar and wind developers, Trump’s Day One executive order putting a 60-day freeze on final decisions for renewable energy projects on federal lands has also ground key pre-decisional work in government offices responsible for wetlands and species protection to a halt. Renewables developers and their representatives in Washington have pressed the government for answers, yet received inconsistent information on its approach to renewables permitting that varies between lower level regional offices. “In other words,” Holzman wrote, “despite years of the Republican Party inching slowly toward ‘all of the above’ energy and climate rhetoric that seemed to leave room for renewables, solar and wind developers have so far found themselves at times shut out of the second Trump administration.”
The deadline for countries to submit new climate targets is fast approaching, and many of the world’s largest polluters are not ready. Under the Paris Agreement, nations have until February 10 to submit their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) outlining 2035 emissions goals and plans for reaching those goals. According to the Financial Times, the European Union, India, Australia, and South Africa will likely miss the deadline. One expert estimated that just one third of G20 economies would submit their plans on time. “Because of the shock of the U.S. presidency and all the other issues, there is not a lot of leader attention on this issue,” said Nick Mabey, co-founder of climate think-tank E3G. There’s no penalty for a late submission, and some say that filing a little late is fine so long as the final plans are robust. “This next round of NDCs may be the most important documents to be produced in a multilateral context so far this century,” UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said last year. “As they add up, they will determine which direction the world will take over the coming decades.”
A California judge on Monday sided with the state in its legal battle with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups by dismissing two claims that California’s climate laws violate the Constitution. The laws in focus require that large companies report their emissions and any climate-related financial risks. The Chamber of Commerce filed its complaint against the laws last year, saying they were in violation of the First Amendment because they “unlawfully attempt to regulate speech.”
A geoengineering project in the Arctic involving using glass beads to try to reflect some of the sunlight has been shut down over concerns that the beads pose a “potential risks to the Arctic food chain.”
Here’s one federal climate program that’s still working — for now.
The first two weeks of the Trump administration have been chaotic for the clean energy industry, to say the least. Offshore wind permitting is on hold and state governments are canceling plans to sign new contracts. Trump’s federal funding freeze was on, then off-but-actually-still-on, and then technically off again. Despite a court injunction on the pause, many grant recipients still seem to be locked out of their funding portals.
But one climate initiative that’s also one of the president’s biggest bugbears has escaped his meddling thus far: The federal tax credit for electric vehicles is still functioning normally.
Former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created a tax credit of up to $7,500 for new electric vehicles and $4,000 for used vehicles. As of January of this year, about 16 EV and plug-in hybrid models were eligible for the new vehicle credit, which is limited to models that are assembled in North America and meet certain battery sourcing requirements. A loophole in the rules also allows dealers to apply the tax credit to any electric vehicle lease, meaning dealers can offer lessees a discount on a much wider range of options.
Trump attacked the subsidy on the campaign trail, and his transition team was reportedly planning to kill it. One of his first executive orders took aim at a number of electric vehicle-related programs, ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to revoke waivers that allow California and other states to pass stronger emissions standards for vehicles than the federal government’s. His funding review and freeze specifically called out the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a $5 billion program to fund EV charging infrastructure. But even though EV charger grantees couldn’t access their funding, car dealerships around the country did not have any trouble getting into the Internal Revenue Service’s portal to log their electric vehicle sales and file for reimbursement for the tax credit.
When someone purchases an eligible electric vehicle, the buyer can either claim the tax credit on their own tax return or they can “transfer” it to their dealership, allowing the dealer to take the credit amount off the sale price. Dealers can then file for a direct reimbursement from the Internal Revenue Service.
I reached out to the National Automobile Dealers Association, which represents new car dealers, to ask if they had heard from any of their members about issues with the advanced payment program for the EV tax credit. “We checked into this earlier in the week, both on the dealer end and with Treasury,” Jared Allen, the vice president for public affairs told me on Friday. “Nothing has changed with the availability of advanced payments to dealers for EV tax credits.”
The president does not have the authority to end the EV tax credit program on his own — changes would have to come through Congress. Before Trump’s inauguration, Republicans on the House Budget Committee circulated a long list of potential cost-cutting measures that included eliminating many Inflation Reduction Act programs. One menu item recommended cutting all clean energy tax credits, but a separate proposal explicitly suggested keeping the EV tax credit and closing the leasing loophole. The Committee is aiming to present a first draft of a budget reconciliation bill by the end of this week, according to E&E News, at which point we’ll see what made the cut.
Rob and Jesse talk with former Ford economist Ellen Hughes-Cromwick.
Over the past 30 years, the U.S. automaking industry has transformed how it builds cars and trucks, constructing a continent-sized network of factories, machine shops, and warehouses that some call “Factory North America.” President Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports will disrupt and transform those supply chains. What will that mean for the automaking industry and the transition to EVs?
Ellen Hughes-Cromwick is the former chief economist at Ford Motor Company, where she worked from 1996 to 2014, as well as the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce. She is now a senior visiting fellow at Third Way and a senior advisor at MacroPolicy Perspective LLC.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Ellen about how automakers build cars today, why this system isn’t built for trade barriers, and whether Trump’s tariffs could counterintuitively help electric vehicles. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: I hear often that we’re also sending parts back and forth as well — that particularly near the border with Canada, we have manufacturing parts suppliers on both sides of the border. So it’s not just the final car, it’s also pieces of the car going back and forth. How does stuff move around in this sort of complicated trade network between, Canada, the U.S., and Mexico?
Ellen Hughes-Cromwick: There is a lot of back and forth, and as you mentioned, a lot of the automotive analysts track the travel of not just the vehicles, but the parts. And the latest estimates show that in some cases, we’re going back and forth across the Ambassador Bridge here in Detroit, you know, six, eight times.
So when you say all of a sudden, as of tomorrow, I’m going to put a 25% tariff on that — I mean, that basically shutters businesses. You can’t absorb a 25% hit, especially if it’s a part or an assembled vehicle. Part of that 25% you could probably absorb, but for the thin margins that parts suppliers work for day in and day out, I mean, there’s just no way. You’re better off shuttering your business. I hate to say that, but you know, you just can’t make the equation work, with a 25% hit.
Jenkins: So this is hypothetical structure, I don’t know if this is exactly right, but so you might have engine parts manufactured in Michigan being sent to Windsor, Ontario to assemble an internal combustion engine. And then it goes back to a plant somewhere else in the U.S. to be assembled into a vehicle. Maybe you get the glass from somewhere for the windows, you know, these are all moving back and forth on a regular basis after so many years of free trade agreements between the two countries, or the three.
Hughes-Cromwick: That’s right. That’s right. And again, coming back to Michigan, because we’re so close to the suppliers in Canada, and we have the lion’s share of automotive suppliers, especially small and mid-size suppliers — so the tier two, tier three. They’re supplying to a tier one big supplier like Magna or Borg.
So you’ve got a lot of these tier two, tier three suppliers in Michigan. Well, why? Because they’re getting a part from a Canadian supplier, putting it into theirs. And maybe that’s a component that goes into an internal combustion engine that’s being produced.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Download Heatmap Labs and Hydrostor’s free report to discover the crucial role of long duration energy storage in ensuring a reliable, clean future and stable grid. Learn more about Hydrostor here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.