Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

Trump’s Gift to the Timber Industry

On logging in national forests, fires in the Carolinas, and fusion

Trump’s Gift to the Timber Industry
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Firefighters in Japan are battling the country’s largest wildfire in 30 years • Tropical Cyclone Alfred is hurtling toward Australia’s Queensland coast • Some 170 million Americans are in the path of a storm system that will bring severe thunderstorms and tornadoes to the South and Mid-Atlantic regions through Wednesday.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Wildfires break out across North and South Carolina

More than 175 wildfires erupted across parts of North and South Carolina over the weekend, fueled by dry, windy conditions. About 4,200 acres have burned so far. The largest blaze, known as the Carolina Forest fire, spans about 1,600 acres and is located west of Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. It was about 30% contained as of last night. A state of emergency was declared in South Carolina on Sunday. Parts of the region are under fire danger warnings through the rest of today.

X/WBTWNews13

2. Trump aims to ramp up logging

President Trump signed an executive order over the weekend directing the Departments of Interior and Agriculture, as well as the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, to investigate ways to boost timber production across national forests and other public lands. The order slams “onerous” policies that have “prevented full utilization” of U.S. timber resources, likely referring to environmental regulations such as the Endangered Species Act. Last week Trump tapped Tom Schultz, a former Idaho timber executive, to lead the Forest Service, a move seen as a win for the timber industry. The administration is considering tariffs on timber imports, which could raise construction costs. “Taken together with massive staff cuts to the Forest Service that included reductions in wildland firefighters and support personnel, this order may offer a boost to timber industry profits — but carries heavy implications for the climate and for wildfire season in 2025 and beyond,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, representing environmental legal group Earthjustice.

3. China sets sights on commercial nuclear fusion by 2050

China wants to use nuclear fusion for clean power generation at scale by 2050, the country’s state-owned atomic company, China National Nuclear Corp., said on Friday. China’s experimental fusion reactors have been making progress in testing. In January, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak reportedly maintained a loop of plasma for more than 1,000 seconds, which was “a step towards maintaining prolonged, confined plasma loops that future reactors will need to generate electricity,” as LiveScienceexplained. China is planning for a demonstration phase in 2045, before going commercial by 2050. It also plans to build more fission reactors and small modular reactors in the near-term. “China is set to leapfrog the U.S. and France as the owner of the world’s biggest [nuclear] reactor fleet by 2030,” according toBloomberg.

4. Watershed invites proposals from carbon removal suppliers

Climate software company Watershed is issuing its first-ever request for proposals from carbon removal suppliers to fulfill an anticipated demand from its customers for 1 megaton of carbon removal credits over the next 18 months. Watershed is a sustainability platform that helps companies manage and reduce emissions. It claims to currently manage over 2 gigatons of emissions for customers including Walmart, Visa, Airbnb, General Motors, and six U.S. banks. “We are seeking carbon project partners to build a supply pipeline for our customers,” the company said. “We are excited to grow our partner ecosystem with a small group of providers whom we plan to highlight in future buyer cohort announcements.” The company said its new callout is “the first RFP in the market to procure both nature-based and engineered removals together.” Applications are due by March 31.

5. Vineyard Wind set for completion in 2025

The Vineyard Wind project is scheduled for completion this year, according to Spanish power company Iberdrola, whose subsidiary Avangrid is developing the wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts. As E&E Newsreported, Iberdrola’s executive chair Ignacio Galán told investors last week he was confident the company’s renewables investments would go ahead under President Trump. The comments “mark a vote of confidence in U.S. offshore wind at a time when the industry has been rocked by Trump's decision to freeze new wind permits and review existing ones.” Vineyard resumed sending power to the grid in January after a six-month pause following a very public problem with one of its turbine blades.

THE KICKER

“The energy transition is a one-way ticket.”

–Economists Eric Beinhocker and J. Doyne Farmer explain in The Wall Street Journal why the clean energy revolution is unstoppable.

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

Tariffs Will Flatten the U.S. Bicycle Industry

Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.

An e-bike and money.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.

Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Economy

Tariffs Are Making Gas Cheaper — But Not Cheap Enough

Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.

A gas station.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.

But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Electric Vehicles

There Has Never Been a Better Time for EV Battery Swapping

With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.

A battery with wheels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.

That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.

Keep reading...Show less
Green