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On back-to-back storms, enhanced rock weathering, and SCOTUS
Current conditions: Another atmospheric river is taking aim at southern Oregon and northern California • Temperatures in southeastern Australia could reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend for the first time in four years • Nearly 50 inches of snow have been recorded in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Climate change “supercharged” this year’s typhoon season in the Philippines, according to new research from the World Weather Attribution. Six typhoons slammed into the country in November alone, double the “typical” number of storms for the month. At one point, four typhoons were churning in the Pacific basin simultaneously. Some areas were hit three times, highlighting “the challenges of adapting to back-to-back extreme weather events.” More than 170 people were killed, and the estimated economic toll is nearly half a billion dollars. “The storms were more likely to develop more strongly and reach the Philippines at a higher intensity than they otherwise would have,” said Ben Clarke, a weather researcher at Imperial College London and one of the authors on the report. The image below shows the tracks of seven storms between September and November:
World Weather Attribution
A couple of Supreme Court updates today: The Biden administration is recommending the Court reject an appeal from a group of Big Oil firms regarding a 2023 ruling out of Hawaii that permitted Honolulu to sue Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and Sunoco for allegedly lying to the public about the climate damages caused by burning fossil fuels. The Hawaii Supreme Court initially rejected the companies’ claim that the suit was overstepping into regulatory territory reserved for the federal government. The solicitor general is also urging the Supreme Court to reject an attempt by 19 GOP state attorneys general to block a lawsuit from five Democratic-led states against major oil companies.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court this week said it would not pause an EPA rule, issued earlier this year, requiring the cleanup of coal ash dumping sites. A Kentucky electric utility had requested the rule be put on hold.
Beleaguered hydrogen-battery electric truck company Nikola is scrambling to avoid bankruptcy by laying off another chunk of its workforce. It cut 15% of its staff back in October, and it’s unclear how deep this next round will be. The company is losing about $200 million a quarter, Electrekreported. Earlier this week Nikola announced it would sell company shares to try to raise $100 million. In a filing with the SEC, the company wrote: “We currently estimate that our existing financial resources are only adequate to fund our forecasted operating costs and meet our obligations into, but not through, the first quarter of 2025.”
In case you missed it: A carbon removal startup backed by Google and Microsoft launched yesterday with nearly $60 million in funding. Terradot is one of several companies utilizing enhanced rock weathering (by spreading crushed rock over farmland) to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Coinciding with the launch, Google announced it was purchasing 200,000 tons of removal credits from Terradot to be delivered by the early 2030s, which the tech giant said is its largest ERW deal to date and its first direct investment in an ERW company. In all, Terradot launches with signed agreements to remove nearly 300,000 tons of CO2. The company has a scaled pilot in Brazil.
“To unlock enhanced rock weathering as a useful tool for CO2 removal, we need to deploy it at scale and learn how to measure the results rigorously using real-world data,” said Google’s head of carbon credits and removals, Randy Spock. “Terradot is well-positioned to do that work in an especially promising geography, and we’re excited to support them to help deliver significant amounts of CO2 removal both for Google’s net zero goal and for the planet.”
New research published in the journal Science concluded that a recent marine heat wave killed off more than half of Alaska’s population of common murres, resulting in “the largest documented wildlife mortality event in the modern era.” In total, some 4 million of the birds died between 2014 and 2016 due to fish die-off from rising temperatures in the north Pacific. “Population abundance estimates since then have found no evidence of recovery,” the researchers wrote, “suggesting that the heatwave may have led to an ecosystem shift.”
A common murre colony in Alaska in 2014 and 2021. Nora Rojek/USFWS; Brie Drummond/USFWS
A common murre colony in Alaska in 2021. Nora Rojek/USFWS; Brie Drummond/USFWS
Tiktok’s annual carbon footprint is estimated to be about 50 million metric tons of CO2, which, for context, is more than Greece emits in a year.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.