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Last summer was the hottest in two millennia. We won’t get any relief this year.
An overwhelming majority of Americans will experience above-average heat this summer, and temperatures in more than half of the contiguous United States are expected to top the historical average by at least 2 degrees Fahrenheit, according to AccuWeather. New York is expected to endure twice as many 90-plus-degree days as last year; Boston could experience up to four times as many.
Americans got a taste of what’s to come this week, with a blistering heat wave that began in the Southwest and has scorched the East Coast for the past three days. That heat may have come early based on the historical averages, but considering more recent trends, it’s right on track.
“The biggest changes that we have seen in recent decades is that the heat wave season has been expanding, starting earlier in the late spring and ending later into early fall, on average,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson told Heatmap.
The northern Rockies, Great Lakes, and the Northeast are areas of particular concern, Paul Pastelok, AccuWeather’s Lead Long-Range Forecaster, told Heatmap. Those regions will likely experience less precipitation and more intense heat this summer compared to their historical average. “The Northern Plains and Upper Midwest are tricky,” Pastelok said. “Right now, this area is getting rain, but this could cut off by the very end of June into July, and turn around to dryness with the heat following.”
While temperatures will most likely peak in the interior Southwest — Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico — by early July, the region can expect temperatures between 112 and 118 degrees until then. Monsoon season, which brings warm winds and rainfall inland, will likely arrive in late July instead of the usual late June, Pastelok said. Peak heat could come much later — anytime between July and September — for those in the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and the Northeast.
The biggest “warm anomalies” are expected in the Southwest and central Rockies, the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley and the Northeast, according Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. “We are looking at anomalies for the entire summer of +4 degrees (F) which is pretty significant over a 3 month period,” Kines wrote in an email to Heatmap.
Heat won’t be the only extreme weather this season. Drought could be severe, particularly in the Southwest — including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where rainfall could come in below 50% of the historical average. That dry spell could intensify over the northern Plains, Great Lakes, and the Northeast later in the summer. The Gulf Coast, meanwhile, can anticipate a staggering 22 to 36 inches of rain this season — compared to its usual 15 to 24 inches — which will likely make flooding an issue.
After a wetter winter, meteorologists anticipated a slow start to the wildfire season in California and the Southwest. In fact, the number of wildfires this year is expected to come in below average: AccuWeather meteorologists predict 35,000 to 50,000 wildfires this year, compared to a historical average of about 69,000. Yet the fires in California also seem to have picked up speed a little earlier than normal. Last week saw more than two dozen fires in the state, perhaps heralding increased fire activity to come.
So how will we deal with all this? Northern cities, especially, tend to be less equipped to deal with extreme summer heat. In Boston, temperatures reached a record-breaking 98 degrees on Wednesday, a day after Mayor Michelle Wu declared a heat emergency. The city opened cooling centers this week in an attempt to minimize the number of heat-related medical emergencies.
Boston Green New Deal Director Oliver Sellers-Garcia told Heatmap that the city is bringing more government agencies into the heat management effort. The Fire and Parks departments plan to set up misting stations, and the city will continue to provide extra pop-up cooling centers in coordination with Boston’s Centers for Youth and Families. Those strategies, Sellers-Garcia said, “can have an instant benefit for someone, whether it’s just a super hot day and they have to get to work or it’s a declared heat wave.”
In Florida, people are used to chronic heat, Miami-Dade County’s Chief Heat Officer Jane Gilbert told Heatmap. Last year the county had 42 heat advisories (which happens when the thermometer reaches 105) and 70 warnings (110), Gilbert said, and this season is already proving more intense: May was the warmest ever on record in the state. To protect residents, the county has established a comprehensive public awareness campaign that targets those most affected by the heat, including outdoor workers, children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with chronic illnesses. It also runs more than 30 cooling centers.
According to Gilbert, the goal is to educate people about the extent of heat impacts so they can make better choices — drink more water, find shade, limit physical activity — and protect their health. “We haven’t fully appreciated, historically as a community, how it impacts our lives,” she said.
Here’s what’s happened so far ...
June 24: On Juneteenth, over 82 million Americans were under active National Weather Service extreme heat alerts — but, due to the national holiday, many publicly operated cooling centers were closed. While Boston had opened 14 new facilities in partnership with the Centers for Youth and Families, for instance, none of them stayed open Wednesday.
The same thing happened in New York, where more than 200 cooling centers were closed for the holiday, most of them libraries. While other heat preparedness measures were still in place — Gov. Kathy Hochul announced free admission for state parks — residents counting on a facility near home had to change plans last minute. On Sunday, New York turned 45 public schools into cooling centers, this time because the public libraries were closed due to budget cuts.
In Chicago, only one cooling center was open during the holiday. The lack of cooling spaces available sparked action from homelessness advocates, who are urging the city to offer more cooling centers that are open 24/7 and also to make those facilities available when the heat index is above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because cooling centers are often multi-purpose spaces, data on their usage is limited. In Boston, 245 people visited cooling centers from June 18 to 20, the mayor’s office told me. New York City’s Department of Emergency Management could only say that six people visited four of the schools open Sunday.
June 21: Communities from Kansas to Maine experienced record-breaking temperatures, with heat indices above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places. Cities including Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Burlington, Vermont opened cooling centers, and Boston and New York activated heat emergency plans. Schools in Buffalo, New York moved to half-day schedules for the week in response to temperature advisories.
The heat wave was expected to hold into the weekend, increasing the risk of emergencies. But ensuring that at-risk residents are aware of public services and heat mitigation strategies is often more difficult than simply providing amenities like cooling centers and air conditioners, Benjamin Zaitchik, a professor of climate dynamics at Johns Hopkins University, told Heatmap. “Preventing heat deaths — in principle, at least — is easy,” Zaitchik said. “It just requires good planning, good communication, good networks.”
The same heatwave afflicted much of the Southwestern United States the week before. Temperatures in Phoenix and Las Vegas exceeded 110 degrees, breaking records and prompting cities to issue heat advisories covering tens of millions of people. At a Trump rally in Las Vegas, 24 people received treatment for heat-related complications and six were hospitalized, The Guardianreported.
June 14-19:More than 1,000 people died during the sacred Muslim pilgrimage known as the hajj as extreme heat gripped Saudi Arabia in mid-June. In Mecca, where temperatures exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, worshippers gripped umbrellas and water bottles to combat the heat. A study from 2019 predicted that hajj conditions would exceed an “extreme danger heat threshold” more frequently in the coming decades, especially when the pilgrimage — which is scheduled according to the lunar calendar — coincides with the warmer months of the year.
The death toll was about five times higher than last year, according to CNN.
June 10: Passengers on a Qatar Airways flight passed out from heat as their plane sat on the tarmac at Athens International Airport. Flight 204, which was delayed for three hours with passengers stuck inside, experienced a malfunction in its air conditioning. Two days later, authorities shut down the Acropolis for five hours due to the 102 degree weather, which marked Greece’s earliest heat wave on record. Many schools were also closed for the day, and several air-conditioned spaces were opened to the public. Greece’s Health Ministry advised older people and those with chronic illnesses to stay indoors.
The intense weather continued throughout the weekend, and at least five tourists were reported to have died due to extreme heat.
Other parts of Southern Europe, such as Cyprus and Turk, have also suffered through heat waves this year. During the second week of June, temperatures in Cyprus exceeded 104 degrees every day and classes ended early. On June 14, some areas experienced their hottest June day ever, reaching 113 degrees. That same week, Turkey also battled record temperatures — they were 8 to 12 degrees higher than the average for the season.
May and June: Both Mexico and India faced extreme temperatures during national elections.
Record-breaking heat waves have scorched Mexico since late March, causing blackouts, wildfires, heat strokes, and animal deaths. On May 25, Mexico City set a new heat record, with the temperature there surpassing 94.4 degrees, while other cities in the country registered even higher temperatures — well above 115 degrees. As of June 12, at least 125 deaths had been attributed to the heat, which has been made worse by an intense drought linked to El Niño. With reservoirs at less than 27% capacity, millions could run out of water by the end of this month.
World Weather Attribution, a research group that analyzes the degree to which climate change is causing extreme weather events, estimated that global warming has made extreme temperatures in the region 35 times more likely. “These trends will continue with future warming and events like the one observed in 2024 will be very common” in a world where average temperatures are 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, the group stated in a release.
Despite sweltering conditions, about 100 million voters elected Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, on June 2. In her victory speech, Sheinbaum, a climate scientist with a focus on energy engineering, said she will work to maintain the country’s energy sovereignty. While Sheinbaum has vouched to expand the country’s renewable energy, she has also been criticized for her support of Pemex, the state-owned oil company.
Two days later, on June 4, India re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a third term during the country’s longest-ever heatwave. By the time the weeks-long voting process wrapped, extreme heat had killed more than 100 people. In Uttar Pradesh, at least 33 poll workers died in a single day, CNN reported. In response, local governments have imposed measures to prevent water waste and protect construction workers. Yet, according to analysis by the Centre for Policy Research found in 2023, most of India’s heatwave policies are underfunded and fail to target the country’s most vulnerable groups.
More extreme weather hammered Mexico beginning June 20 as tropical storm Alberto brought torrential rain and flooding to the country’s east. AccuWeather meteorologists said the storm is just the start of a predicted intense hurricane season in the area. Most of India is still under heatwave alerts, but the weather is set to improve in the next few days as the monsoon finally advances after a week-long delay.
May: Scarce rainfall and soaring heat have led to drought conditions that are threatening China’s food production and water supply. The provinces of Shandong and Henan — crucial to the country’s wheat production — are some of the most affected, and the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters has dispatched two disaster relief guidance teams. New technology, such as multi-functional seeders, and multiple reservoirs have been deployed to ameliorate conditions.
Also on Wednesday, the China Meteorological Administration reported that several regional weather stations recorded the highest temperatures ever in mid-June. Conditions are expected to worsen, as some Chinese provinces are expected to reach 111 degrees this week.
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.