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Stumpy stands alone.
It’s hard to miss, rising scraggily up from the soil on the southeast side of the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. It picturesquely frames the Washington Monument with an outstretched limb, which also happens to be its only limb.
Stumpy is a Yoshino Cherry tree, a Prunus x yedoensis, one of the thousands that line the water of the Tidal Basin, and it’s been having a bit of a rough time lately. The nearby seawall, built 80-odd years ago, has slowly been settling into the mud and the muck, dropping about three feet in the time since it was built. High tide is also a foot higher now, and twice a day Stumpy’s roots are inundated with brackish water that’s saltier than the nearby Potomac River — a state of being that is no good for a tree. The trunk looks mostly hollow, like someone took a few large scoops out of it. All but one of the branches have rotted away and been trimmed by its caretakers at the National Park Service, leaving Stumpy with a windblown toupee of sticks, leaves, and buds.
Naturally, people are obsessed.
“This is my ninth cherry blossom season and I would be hard pressed to find another tree that’s gotten either a name or that sort of fame,” said Mike Litterst, Chief of Communications for the National Parks Service and Stumpy’s de facto spokesman. “People are literally lining up to take photos with it this year, and somebody’s even got Stumpy t-shirts now.”
Stumpy’s story began as a Reddit post in 2020, when a user said the tree was “as dead as my love life.” Stumpy is, of course, still kicking, and the Redditor met a girl, but for reasons unknown to everyone including the National Parks Service, the tree has been more popular this year than ever before. Perhaps D.C. was primed for Stumpy’s resurgence; back in December, residents of the Columbia Heights neighborhood became similarly obsessed with a diminutive Christmas tree they’d nicknamed Tiny Timber.
We like to tell stories about trees, and lately I’ve noticed them cropping up more often. Perhaps this is just frequency bias, the detritus of spending the early pandemic in a house with a maple tree in the backyard, where for the first time in my life I found myself paying attention to arboreal rhythms as the seasons changed. But we all, to some extent, became amateur naturalists in lockdown, and the trees (and the birds) are what remain.
Stumpy and Tiny Timber both belong to the Charlie Brown class of trees, the ones that, because of their smallness and sadness and apparent untree-ness, evoke a kind of empathy that allows us to give human emotions to them. Litterst thinks this is why Stumpy is so popular this year — it’s an underdog, and we like underdog stories.
Then there are the stories of magic and majesty, like The Giving Tree and the Kalaloch Tree of Life in Washington State and The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. These are the trees that make us feel small; we gape at their stoic enormity, the generosity with which they share their shade. I think these are the same reasons why tree planting is such a popular, if misguided, climate solution: We are so drawn to the idea of trees being older and wiser than us, we take such comfort in their leaves and branches, that we can’t help but hope they will fix our mistakes for us.
They won’t, of course, and perhaps we ought to reexamine our expectations of trees. Their effects on our planet are matters of circumstance rather than agency; trees, after all, may have accidentally killed off half the planet when they evolved roots a few hundred million years ago. They didn’t know what they were doing then, and they don’t now — an idea I find somewhat freeing, for it lets a tree simply be a tree.
Take Stumpy. Peak bloom was over by the time I made the pilgrimage to see Stumpy for myself: Its flowers and the crowds were both gone, although one couple briefly stopped on their walk to quickly chuckle at Stumpy before continuing.
There’s a sort of solemn quietude to Stumpy without the crowds. There were other, more conventionally beautiful cherry trees nearby, a few of them still hanging onto their pink and white flowers. But Stumpy, standing by the water on its own, with its one lone branch pointing towards the Washington Monument, bucked the trend, as if someone had dropped in a bonsai among the rest.
It reminded me a bit of another out-of-place plant I’d seen, back in 2019, when a tomato sprouted in a wooden piling in the East River, just off Brooklyn Bridge Park. That, too, was the kind of thing that made people stop and point and laugh, but with the kind of laugh one emits when they crawl to the edge of a cliff and look out at the sea yawning below. An errant seed or a stubborn tree: These are conduits for wonder, whispers of the ecosystems we inhabit.
They’re also reminders of our roles as stewards. Despite how it looks, the fact that Stumpy flowered means it’s in pretty good shape overall, Litterst told me, and the parts of the trunk that deliver nutrients to and from the remaining branch are still working as they should. Plans for a new, improved seawall — one that’s embedded in the bedrock unlike its predecessor, so it doesn’t sink — are in the works, with construction planned to begin next year. The National Parks Service doesn’t know how long Stumpy has left, but if it manages to hold out until the seawall is finished it’ll eventually be spared the rising tides and could live to see some of its brethren take their places alongside it.
I’m sure they’ll be pretty, in the way cherry blossoms always are. But I’ll still be going back for Stumpy.
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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.
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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.