You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
“I am increasingly becoming irrelevant in the public conversation,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who until recently worked at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “And I love it.”
For years, such an exalted state was denied to Marvel. Every week, it seemed, someone — a high-profile politician, maybe, or a CEO — would say something idiotic about climate science. Journalists would dutifully call her to get a rebuttal: Yes, climate change is real, she would say, yes, we’re really certain. The media would print the story. Rinse, repeat.
A few years ago, she told a panel, half as a joke, that her highest professional ambition was not fame or a Nobel Prize but total irrelevance — a moment when climate scientists would no longer have anything useful to tell the public.
That 2020 dream is now her 2023 reality. “It’s incredible,” she told me last week. “Science is no longer even a dominant part of the climate story anymore, and I think that’s great. I think that represents just shattering progress.”
We were talking about a question, a private heresy, I’ve been musing about for some time. Because it’s not just the scientists who have faded into the background — over the past few years, the role of climate science itself has shifted. Gradually, then suddenly, a field once defined by urgent questions and dire warnings has become practical and specialized. So for the past few weeks, I’ve started to ask researchers my big question: Have we reached the end of climate science?
“Science is never done,” Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, told me. “There’s always things that we thought we knew that we didn’t.”
“Your title is provocative, but not without basis,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and one of the lead authors of the National Climate Assessment, said.
Not necessarily no, then. My question, I always clarified, had a few layers.
Since it first took shape, climate science has sought to answer a handful of big questions: Why does Earth’s temperature change so much across millennia? What role do specific gases play in regulating that temperature? If we keep burning fossil fuels, how bad could it be — and how hot could it get?
The field has now answered those questions to any useful degree. But what’s more, scientists have advocated and won widespread acceptance of the idea that inevitably follows from those answers, which is that humanity must decarbonize its economy as fast as it reasonably can. Climate science, in other words, didn’t just end. It reached its end — its ultimate state, its Really Big Important Point.
In the past few years, the world has begun to accept that Really Big Important Point. Since 2020, the world’s three largest climate polluters — China, the United States, and the European Union — have adopted more aggressive climate policies. Last year, the global clean-energy market cracked $1 trillion in annual investment for the first time; one of every seven new cars sold worldwide is now an electric vehicle. In other words, serious decarbonization — the end of climate science — has begun.
At the same time, climate science has resolved some of its niggling mysteries. When I became a climate reporter in 2015, questions still lingered about just how bad climate change would be. Researchers struggled to understand how clouds or melting permafrost fed back into the climate system; in 2016, a major paper argued that some Antarctic glaciers could collapse by the end of the century, leading to hyper-accelerated sea-level rise within my lifetime.
Today, not all of those questions have been completely put aside. But scientists now have a better grasp of how clouds work, and some of the most catastrophic Antarctic scenarios have been pushed into the next century. In 2020, researchers even made progress on one of the oldest mysteries in climate science — a variable called “climate sensitivity” — for the first time in 41 years.
Does the field have any mysteries left? “I wouldn’t go quite so far as angels dancing on the head of a pin” to describe them, Hayhoe told me. “But in order to act, we already know what we need.”
“I think at the macro level, what we discover [next] is not necessarily going to change policymakers’ decisions, but you could argue that’s been true since the late 90s,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, agreed.
“Physics didn’t end when we figured out how to do engineering, and now they are both incredibly important,” Marvel said.
Yet across the discipline, you can see research switching their focus from learning to building — from physics, as it were, to engineering. Marvel herself left NASA last year to join Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that focuses on emissions reduction. Hausfather now works at Frontier, a tech-industry consortium that studies carbon-removal technology. Even Hayhoe — who trained as a climate scientist — joined a political-science department a decade ago. “I concluded that the biggest barriers to action were not more science,” she said this week.
To fully understand whether climate science has ended, it might help to go back to the very beginning of the field.
By the late 19th century, scientists knew that Earth was incredibly ancient. They also knew that over long enough timescales, the weather in one place changed dramatically. (Even the ancient Greeks and Chinese had noticed misplaced seashores or fossilized bamboo and figured out what they meant.) But only slowly did questions from chemistry, physics, and meteorology congeal into a new field of study.
The first climate scientist, we now know, was Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur inventor and feminist. In 1856, she observed that glass jars filled with carbon dioxide or water vapor trapped more of the sun’s heat than a jar containing dry air. “An atmosphere of that gas,” she wrote of CO₂, “would give to our earth a high temperature.”
But due to her gender and nationality, her work was lost. So the field began instead with the contributions of two Europeans: John Tyndall, an Irish physicist who in 1859 first identified which gases cause the greenhouse effect; and Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist who in 1896 first described Earth’s climate sensitivity, perhaps the discipline’s most important number.
Arrhenius asked: If the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere were to double, how much would the planet warm? Somewhere from five to six degrees Celsius, he concluded. Although he knew that humanity’s coal consumption was causing carbon pollution, his calculation was a purely academic exercise: We would not double atmospheric CO₂for another 3,000 years.
In fact, it might take only two centuries. Atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels are now 50 percent higher than they were when the Industrial Revolution began — we are halfway to doubling.
Not until after World War II did climate science become an urgent field, as nuclear war, the space race, and the birth of environmentalism forced scientists to think about the whole Earth system for the first time — and computers made such a daring thing possible. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the physicists Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald produced the first computer models of the atmosphere, confirming that climate sensitivity was real. (Last year, Manabe won the Nobel Prize in Physics for that work.) Half a hemisphere away, the oceanographer Charles Keeling used data collected from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory to show that fossil-fuel use was rapidly increasing the atmosphere’s carbon concentration.
Suddenly, the greenhouse effect — and climate sensitivity — were no longer theoretical. “If the human race survives into the 21st century,” Keeling warned, “the people living then … may also face the threat of climatic change brought about by an uncontrolled increase in atmospheric CO₂ from fossil fuels.”
Faced with a near-term threat, climate science took shape. An ever-growing group of scientists sketched what human-caused climate change might mean for droughts, storms, floods, glaciers, and sea levels. Even oil companies opened climate-research divisions — although they would later hide this fact and fund efforts to discredit the science. In 1979, the MIT meteorologist Jules Charney led a national report concluding that global warming was essentially inevitable. He also estimated climate sensitivity at 1.5 to 4 degrees Celsius, a range that would stand for the next four decades.
“In one sense, we’ve already known enough for over 50 years to do what we have to do,” Hayhoe, the Texas Tech professor, told me. “Some parts of climate science have been simply crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s since then.”
Crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s—such an idea would have made sense to the historian Thomas Kuhn. In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that science doesn’t progress in a dependable and linear way, but through spasmodic “paradigm shifts,” when a new theory supplants an older one and casts everything that scientists once knew in doubt. These revolutions are followed by happy doldrums that he called “normal science,” where researchers work to fit their observations of the world into the moment’s dominant paradigm.
By 1988, climate science had advanced to the degree that James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, could confidently warn the Senate that global warming had begun. A few months later, the United Nations convened the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an expert body of scientists asked to report on current scientific consensus.
Yet core scientific questions remained. In the 1990s, the federal scientist Ben Santer and his colleagues provided the first evidence of climate change’s “fingerprint” in the atmosphere — key observations that showed the lower atmosphere was warming in such a way as to implicate carbon dioxide.
By this point, any major scientific questions about climate change were effectively resolved. Paul N. Edwards, a Stanford historian and IPCC author, remembers musing in the early 2000s about whether the IPCC’s physical-science team should pack it up: They had done the job and shown that climate change was real.
Yet climate science had not yet won politically. Santer was harassed over his research; fossil-fuel companies continued to seed lies and doubt about the science for years. Across the West, only some politicians acted as if climate change was real; even the new U.S. president, Barack Obama, could not get a climate law through a liberal Congress in 2010.
It took one final slog for climate science to win. Through the 2010s, scientists ironed out remaining questions around clouds, glaciers, and other runaway feedbacks. “It’s become harder in the last decade to make a publicly skeptical case against mainstream climate science,” Hausfather said. “Part of that is climate science advancing one funeral at a time. But it’s also become so clear and self-evident — and so much of the scientific community supports it — that it’s harder to argue against with any credibility.”
Three years ago, a team of more than two dozen researchers — including Hausfather and Marvel — finally made progress on solving climate science’s biggest outstanding mystery, cutting our uncertainty around climate sensitivity in half. Since 1979, Charney’s estimate had remained essentially unchanged; it was quoted nearly verbatim in the 2013 IPCC report. Now, scientists know that if atmospheric CO₂ were to double, Earth’s temperature would rise 2.6 to 3.9 degrees Celsius.
That’s about as much specificity as we’ll ever need, Hayhoe told me. Now, “we know that climate sensitivity is either bad, really bad, or catastrophic.”
So isn’t climate science over, then? It’s resolved the big uncertainties; it’s even cleared up climate sensitivity. Not quite, Marvel said. She and other researchers described a few areas where science is still vital.
The first — and perhaps most important — is the object that covers two-thirds of Earth’s surface area: the ocean, Edwards told me. Since the 1990s, it has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gases, but we still don’t understand how it formed, much less how it will change over the next century.
Researchers also know some theories need to be revisited. “Antarctica is melting way faster than in the models,” Marvel said, which could change the climate much more quickly than previously imagined. And though the runaway collapse of Antarctica now seems less likely, we could be wrong, Oppenheimer reminded me. “The money that we put into understanding Antarctica is a pittance compared to what you would need to truly understand such a big object,” he said.
And these, mind you, are the known unknowns. There’s still the chance that we discover some huge new climatic process out there — at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, perhaps, or at the base of an Antarctic glacier — that has so far eluded us.
Yet in the wildfires of the old climate science, a new field is being born. The scientists who I spoke with see three big projects.
First, in the past decade, researchers have gotten much better at attributing individual weather events to climate change. They now know that the Lower 48 states are three times more likely to see a warm February than they would without human-caused climate change, for instance, or that Oregon and Washington’s record-breaking 2021 heat wave was “virtually impossible” without warming. This work will keep improving, Marvel said, and it will help us understand where climate models fail to predict the actual experience of climate change.
Second, scientists want to make the tools of climate science more useful to people at the scales where they live, work, and play. “We just don’t yet have the ability to understand in a detailed way and at a small-enough scale” what climate impacts will look like, Oppenheimer told me. Cities should be able to predict how drought or sea-level rise will affect their bridges or infrastructure. Members of Congress should know what a once-in-a-decade heat wave will look like in their district five, 10, or 20 years hence.
“It’s not so much that we don’t need science anymore; it’s that we need science focused on the questions that are going to save lives,” Oppenheimer said. The task before climate science is to steward humanity through the “treacherous next decades where we are likely to warm through the danger zone of 1.5 degrees.”
That brings us to the third project: That climatologists must create a “smoother interface between physical science and social science,” he said. The Yale economist Richard Nordhaus recently won a Nobel Prize for linking climate science with economics, “but other aspects of the human system are still totally undone.” Edwards wanted to get beyond economics altogether: “We need an anthropology and sociology of climate adaptation,” he said. Marvel, meanwhile, wanted to zoom the lens beyond just people. “We don’t really understand ... what the hell plants do,” she told me. Plants and plankton have absorbed half of all carbon pollution, but it’s unclear if they’ll keep doing so or how all that extra carbon has changed how they might respond to warming.
Economics, sociology, botany, politics — you can begin to see a new field taking shape here, a kind of climate post-science. Rooted in climatology’s theories and ideas, it stretches to embrace the breadth of the Earth system. The climate is everything, after all, and in order to survive an era when human desire has altered the planet’s geology, this new field of study must encompass humanity itself — and all the rest of the Earthly mess.
Nearly a century ago, the philosopher Alexander Kojéve concluded it was possible for political philosophy to gain a level of absolute knowledge about the world and, second, that it had done so. In the wake of the French Revolution, some fusion of socialism or capitalism would win the day, he concluded, meaning that much of the remaining “work to do” in society lay not in large-scale philosophizing about human nature, but in essentially bureaucratic questions of economic and social governance. So he became a technocrat, and helped design the market entity that later became the European Union.
Is this climate science’s Kojéve era? It just may be — but it won’t last forever, Oppenheimer reminded me.
“Generations in the future will still be dealing with this problem,” he said. “Even if we get off fossil fuels, some future idiot genius will invent some other climate altering substance. We can never put climate aside — it’s part of the responsibility we inherited when we started being clever enough to invent problems like this in future.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk and traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”
On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”