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On dry conditions in the Big Apple, biodiversity goals, and the future of the IRA
Current conditions: Schools are closed this week in Lahore, Pakistan, due to unprecedented pollution • An extreme red alert for torrential rain has been issued in Barcelona • A storm system in the Caribbean could strengthen into a hurricane by Wednesday.
The COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia came to a disappointing close over the weekend, with negotiators failing to agree on how the world can monitor and fund nature restoration. There were high hopes that the meeting would produce a roadmap for protecting large swathes of land, water, and degraded ecosystems by 2030, but rich nations blocked a proposal for a new fund to help pay for poorer nations’ efforts. “This COP was meant to be a status check on countries’ progress toward saving nature and all indicators on that status are blinking red,” said Crystal Davis, the World Resources Institute’s global director of food, land, and water. There were some bright spots, though, including the creation of a subsidiary body that will ensure Indigenous peoples have a seat at the negotiating table in future UN conservation talks, and a plan to encourage corporations that derive biotechnology products from nature to pay into a conservation fund.
New Yorkers are being asked to conserve water after Mayor Eric Adams placed the city under a drought watch. Last month was the driest NYC October on record, The Washington Post reported. Just 0.01 inches of rain fell in Central Park, far short of the 4 inches or so that usually fall during the month. Residents have been told to take shorter showers and fix leaks, and Adams called on the city’s agencies to draw up plans to conserve water. “Mother Nature is in charge, and so we must make sure we adjust,” he said. More than half the country was under drought conditions last month.
In case you missed it: Regulators from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Friday rejected a proposal to increase the load capacity of Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. The proposal was part of a deal to supply more power to a nearby Amazon data center. FERC voted 2-1 to block the move, citing concerns about grid reliability and rising energy bills for the public. FERC Chairman Willie Phillips dissented, and said the decision “fails to recognize the creative approach the agreement took and fails to demonstrate flexibility to ensure the grid can reliably and affordably handle rising demand.”
The CEO of oil giant TotalEnergies called for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to keep existing environmental laws in place if he wins this week’s election. Patrick Pouyanné told the Financial Times that revoking climate rules enacted under President Biden would create a “wild west” situation and hurt the oil industry’s reputation. “My view is that this will not help the industry, but on the contrary it will demonize, and then the dialogue will be even more antagonized,” Pouyanné said. Trump has promised to rescind much of the Inflation Reduction Act funding. Exxon’s chief financial officer Kathy Mikells told the FT that the IRA is helping support the economy, and “that gives a lot of people a lot of incentive to stand behind the IRA.”
Canada, the fourth-largest oil producer in the world, will publish a proposal today to cap greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel energy production. Energy is Canada’s highest-polluting sector, with oil and gas accounting for a quarter of all emissions and producing “more than double the greenhouse gas pollution than all other industries combined,” according to Hermine Landry, a spokeswoman for Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault. Landry told Reuters that the cap-and-trade system would incentivize high-emitting companies to invest in projects that reduce pollution, though an earlier report from Deloitte said the cap would likely nudge companies to cut production. Canada has a goal of curbing emissions by at least 40% compared to 2005 levels by the end of the decade. Whether this new proposal comes into effect will depend largely on the outcome of the next election, set to be held in late 2025.
“This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.” –Tim Stevens at The Verge tries to describe the digital acceleration tone produced by Rolls-Royce’s first EV, the ultra-luxury Spectre, which starts at $420,000.
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On the Texas floods, wind and solar restrictions, and an executive order
Current conditions: An extreme heat warning is in place for Phoenix, which could reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit today • Flooding in central North Carolina has killed at least one person after two months’ worth of rain fell in 24 hours • Parts of the U.K. this week will experience their third heatwave in less than a month.
The catastrophic flooding in central Texas that claimed more than 100 lives late last week was intensified by human-driven climate change, according to a rapid attribution report by ClimaMeter, an experimental framework funded by the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research. The researchers compared historic and contemporary weather patterns in Texas’ Hill Country and found that conditions going into Fourth of July weekend were up to 7% wetter than during similar events in the past. “These results suggest that meteorological conditions similar to those of the July 2025 Texas floods are becoming more favorable for extreme precipitation, in line with what would be expected under continued global warming,” the researchers wrote, concluding that “natural variability alone cannot explain the changes in precipitation associated with this very exceptional meteorological condition.”
The development of new wind and solar power plants is “now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country,” according to a major new survey of public records and local ordinances by my colleagues Robinson Meyer and Charlie Clynes. Their report found bans and restrictions — such as a rule that wind turbines must be placed a certain number of miles from homes, or that solar farms cannot take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land — in a total of 605 U.S. counties, including at least 59 municipalities in the more-renewables-friendly Northeast. In total, the bans and restrictions on renewables cover approximately 17% of the continental United States’ total land mass.
Robinson and Charlie’s findings have not been previously reported, and their research involved calling thousands of counties where laws, in some cases, were not in existing public databases. You can access the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments via Heatmap Pro, here.
In an executive order on Monday, President Trump directed the Treasury Department to issue “new and revised guidance” restricting which projects will still qualify for wind and solar tax credits. The order builds on the repeal of renewable energy tax credits in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which had stipulated that such projects would need to begin construction within a year and come online by 2028 to be eligible for the subsidies. Now the government will take a stricter approach to defining “the beginning of construction” to prevent “the artificial acceleration or manipulation of eligibility” by limiting credits to projects in which “a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
Freedom Caucus members had described the tax credits as a sticking point during their late negotiations over the bill. As my colleagues Jael Holzman and Katie Brigham previously reported, North Carolina Republican Representative Ralph Norman alluded to a conversation with Trump in which the president had assured him that he was “going to deal with [the tax credits] in his own way.” It appears the executive order is the follow-through on that promise. Additionally, Trump’s executive order called for the Department of the Interior to determine whether any of its policies, practices, or regulations “provide preferential treatment to wind and solar facilities in comparison to dispatchable energy sources” and revise them accordingly.
An Energy Department report released Monday warned that blackouts in the U.S. could “increase by 100% in 2030” if the country continues to close its coal and natural gas power plants. The report, completed at the direction of an April executive order by President Trump, anticipates 209 gigawatts of new generation by 2030 to replace 104 gigawatts of retirements — but “only 22 gigawatts would come from firm baseload generation sources,” so that, “even assuming no retirements, the model found increased risk of outages in 2030 by a factor of 34.” The DOE concluded that the U.S. grid “will not be able to sustain the combined impact of coal and other plant closures, an overreliance on intermittent energy sources like wind and solar, and data center growth, highlighting the urgency of increasing dispatchable energy output.”
The DOE’s report sets the stage for the department to continue to prevent the phase-out of old fossil fuel power plants and open new facilities. Many are skeptical of the agency’s logic, however, pointing to renewable-heavy grid success stories like Texas. The Department of Energy “appears to exaggerate the risk of blackouts and undervalue the contributions of entire resource classes, like wind, solar, and battery storage,” Caitlin Marquis, the managing director at Advanced Energy United, said, per Axios.
On Monday, the Trump administration sent letters to 14 countries warning them they’ll face tariffs of up to 40% if they don’t reach a trade deal with the U.S. by an August 1 deadline. Significantly, automaking giants Japan and South Korea — which each account for about 4% of U.S. imports, per The New York Times — were among the recipients, and face 25% tariffs according to the letters. As my colleague Jael Holzman previously reported, Japan in particular had been “positioned to be an ally in U.S. efforts to wean off China-linked minerals and signed a minerals trade agreement under Biden,” with the imposition of such tariffs potentially threatening to tank America’s own “mineral supply chain renaissance.”
Tom Nicholson/Getty Images
The Seine River opened for swimming last weekend for the first time since 1923, following an extensive effort to upgrade the city’s sewer systems and water treatment facilities. “I never imagined being in the water close to the Eiffel Tower,” one swimmer told Reuters.
Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.