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A summer school program in Roanoke, Virginia, could change the way people think about heat.
According to legend, the ghost of Lucy Addison still roams the halls of her namesake middle school in Roanoke, Virginia. She’s particularly fond of the basement, where the art and technology rooms are.
So when Brian Kreppeneck got a few thermal cameras for a summer program he was running this year, he knew exactly how he was going to teach his students how to use them: with a ghost hunt. He took them downstairs to the auditorium, shut off the lights, and had them train the cameras on things like the air-conditioning vents, a digital clock blinking in one corner, and the empty auditorium stage.
“And wouldn't you know it, as we're looking at the auditorium stage, a little mouse ran across the auditorium,” Kreppeneck, a science teacher at the school, told me. “They screamed and ran out, and that’s how they learned to use the thermal cameras.”
The cameras had a use beyond ghost-hunting and scaring schoolchildren (and mice): The students were going to use them to measure temperatures in and around their school. Over the course of a week, they pointed the cameras at all kinds of things in the world around them, from basketball courts baking in the sun to the shady ground underneath trees. They also clipped sensors to their shoes, which measured ambient temperatures as the kids went about their days. But that was just the beginning.
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“We wanted to develop a curriculum where students learn both about the problem of urban heat, and then also are able to connect that with potential solutions that come from urban planning,” said Theodore Lim, assistant professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech and the designer of the summer program. “We want them to feel like there are things that [they] could do in [their] own neighborhoods to help mitigate some of those temperatures.”
Urban heat is a longstanding, intractable problem. Study after study has shown that cities are noticeably hotter than surrounding rural areas; this is called the Urban Heat Island effect. Many studies have also shown that the hottest parts of most cities tend to be the areas that house lower-income communities and communities of color, thanks to a dearth of vegetation, tightly packed buildings, and an overabundance of construction materials that radiate heat like concrete. Richer neighborhoods, meanwhile, tend to be lusher, with more space between buildings and, often, building materials like wood or brick that do a better job of dissipating heat.
But understanding just how the built environment affects heat is pretty hard. Meteorologists and weather apps tend to draw data from sensors at airports, which can’t give us any insight into the contours of heat within specific neighborhoods. The numbers we see on our phones often don’t reflect the temperatures we feel; a neighborhood by a river or a park, for example, would be much cooler than a neighborhood with high concentrations of concrete and asphalt, yet residents in both places would see the same temperature in their apps or on TV.
After a week of collecting data with another teacher, the middle-schoolers came back to Kreppeneck’s classroom to figure out what all the numbers had to say. Put together, the data from the thermal cameras and the shoe sensors created something few of us get to see: a personalized look at how the built world around them shaped the way heat worked in their lives. As Lim and Kreppeneck expected, the temperatures the kids experienced were often higher than the temperatures measured by the sensors at a nearby airport, sometimes by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit:
Temperatures collected by sensors on students’ sneakers compared to temperature recorded at a nearby weather station. Courtesy Theodore Lim
Each colored line represents the data from a student at one of the five schools that participated, while the black line represents the temperature reported by the weather station at a nearby airport. If we follow a few of the blue lines, which represent students from Addison middle school — the one with the ghost — we see some of their personal temperatures spiking high above the black line. This could be for a few reasons: maybe they’re playing basketball on a concrete court, or eating lunch outside, or walking around a neighborhood with few trees.
But on each day, when the black line is at its peak, we see almost all of the students’ temperatures dip far below it. That was when the kids were cooling off indoors, often in air-conditioned buildings. As day turns to night, we see temperatures at the weather station dip below what some of the kids experienced indoors. By the next morning, as the kids start going about their days, their lines spike above the weather station again.
“Before they did this activity, if you asked one of these middle school kids if humans can control the temperature outside, they’d say no way,” Lim said. “But then they start to make these correlations: Humans make decisions about where to plant trees, or where to build parking lots, or what color different surfaces should be. And so we kind of do control the outdoor temperature.”
This kind of realization also shifts heat away from being a personal issue that can be solved by, say, drinking water or cranking the air conditioner, to a systemic one. There’s something kind of freeing about this: Lim said that instead of being ashamed that their families might not be able to afford air conditioning, the students came to recognize that their neighborhoods were historically hotter because of decisions made by other people. Northeast and Southeast Roanoke, for example, both saw higher temperatures than the Northwest and Southwest quadrants, and the entire city was significantly hotter than the rest of Roanoke County:
Temperatures recorded in each quadrant over the course of the summer program. The bars show the range, while the boxes are the average. Courtesy Theodore Lim.
Armed with their temperature data, the students spent the second week of their summer program in Kreppeneck’s class learning about urban planning and mapping out ways their own neighborhoods could be redesigned to mitigate heat.
“As science teachers, we’ve always struggled to make the connection between science in the classroom and home,” Kreppeneck told me. “There’s always been some sort of a wall there, where the kids just think science takes place in the classroom. But giving them a real-world project made these concepts transcend the classroom.”
Kreppeneck also talked to his students about activism and advocating for change. This was the idea of Virginia Tech’s Lim; activism gives the kids a sense of agency over their built environment, and it also encourages them to start conversations with the adults in their lives who previously might not have paid much attention to climate change, whether due to a lack of information or the impression that it didn’t impact them. But climate change continues to push global temperatures higher — this September was the hottest on record — and the effect of climate change on heat is becoming increasingly harder to ignore. Creating policy to deal with those changes, however, is a difficult task.
“In Roanoke, as is probably the case in many cities, there's kind of a lot of contention between the government and some of these more vulnerable communities because of the history of urban renewal,” Lim said.
As Martha Park writes in a beautiful illustrated history for Bloomberg, northeast Roanoke was a thriving home for black and immigrant residents prior to urban renewal, a policy James Baldwin once called “negro removal.” Then, in 1955, the city declared the area “blighted,” seized the entire neighborhood through eminent domain, burned the buildings to the ground, and even exhumed nearly a thousand bodies from the local cemetery, dumping them in a mass grave outside town. Today, the area is mostly pavement and industrial parks.
“There’s a lot of mistrust on both sides,” Lim told me. “I’ve found that using youth-based community science is a relatively uncontroversial way of getting at some issues that actually do have very deep systemic causes.”
This was the third year Lim ran his program in Roanoke. In earlier years, Lim ran the program by himself at just one of the schools; this summer’s group, consisting of 130 students from all five Roanoke middle schools over the course of six weeks, was by far the largest, and Kreppeneck and another teacher took over most of the day-to-day. Going forward, Lim hopes it’ll turn into something more than a middle-school summer program; community leaders are talking about putting together a climate action plan for the city, and he’s exploring the possibility of creating programs at local high schools and churches that build on the middle school curriculum. The idea is to get the message about heat, and the solutions for it, out into the community in as many ways as possible.
Kreppeneck’s already planning on incorporating urban heat into his syllabus for the spring semester, expanding the two-week summer program into something that the students can engage with on a deeper level.
“My hope is that the kids will start talking about it, and start taking ownership,” Kreppeneck said. “Watching the looks on their faces, watching how the wheels started turning as to how they would change their neighborhood, it was very rewarding. If they believe in something, they can make change. It starts with them.”
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Current conditions: A late-season nor’easter could bring minor flooding to the Boston area• It’s clear and sunny today in Erbil, Iraq, where the country’s first entirely off-grid, solar-powered village is now operating • Thursday will finally bring a break from severe storms in the U.S., which has seen 280 tornadoes more than the historical average this year.
1. House GOP passes reconciliation bill after late-night tweaks to clean energy tax credits
The House passed the sweeping “big, beautiful” tax bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote, mostly along party lines. Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no, while House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present;” two additional Republicans didn’t vote.
The bill will effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written — although the Wednesday night manager’s amendment included some tweaks to how, exactly, as well as a few concessions to moderates. Updates include:
The bill now heads to the Senate — where more negotiations will almost certainly follow — with Republicans aiming to have it on President Trump’s desk by July 4.
2. FEMA cancels 4-year strategic plan, axing focus on ‘climate resilience’
The combative new acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, rescinded the organization’s four-year strategic plan on Wednesday, per Wired. Though the document, which was set to expire at the end of 2026, does not address specific procedures for given disasters, it does lay out goals and objectives for the agency, including “lead whole of community in climate resilience” and “install equality as a foundation of emergency management.” In axing the strategic plan, Richardson told staff that the document “contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission.”
A FEMA employee who spoke with Wired stressed that while rescinding the plan does not have immediate operational impacts, it can still have “big downstream effects.” Another characterized the move by the administration as symbolic: “There are very real changes that have been made that touch on [equity and climate change] that are more important than the document itself.”
3. Energy Department redirects Puerto Rican rooftop solar investment to upkeep of fossil fuel plants
The U.S. federal government is redirecting a $365 million investment in rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico to instead maintain the island’s fossil fuel-powered grid, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday. The award, which dates to the Biden administration, was intended to provide stable power to Puerto Ricans, who have become accustomed to blackouts due to damaged and outdated infrastructure. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority declared bankruptcy in 2017, and a barrage of major hurricanes — most notably 2017’s Hurricane Maria — have destabilized the island’s grid, Reuters reports.
In Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s statement, he said the funds will go toward “dispatching baseload generation units, supporting vegetation control to protect transmission lines, and upgrading aging infrastructure.” But Javier Rúa Jovet, a public policy director for Puerto Rico’s Solar and Energy Storage Association, added to The Associated Press that “There is nothing faster and better than solar batteries.”
4. EDF, Shell, and others to collaborate on hydrogen emission tracker
The Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday that it is launching an international research initiative to track hydrogen emissions from North American and European facilities, in partnership with Shell, TotalEnergies, Air Products, and Air Liquide, as well as other academic and technology partners. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that, through chemical reactions, can affect the lifetime and abundances of planet-warming gases like methane and ozone. Despite being a “leak-prone gas,” hydrogen emissions have been poorly studied.
“As hydrogen becomes an increasingly important part of the energy system, developing a robust, data-driven understanding of its emissions is essential to supporting informed decisions and guiding future investments in the sector,” Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist and senior vice president of EDF, said in a statement. Notably, EDF took a similar approach to tracking methane over a decade ago and ultimately exposed that emissions were “a far greater threat” than official government estimates suggested.
5. The best-selling SUV in America will now be available only as a hybrid
Toyota
The bestselling SUV in America, the Toyota RAV4, will be available only as a hybrid beginning with the 2026 model, Car and Driver reports. The car will be available both as a conventional hybrid and as a plug-in that works with CCS-compatible DC fast chargers, meaning “owners can quickly fill up its battery during long road trips” to minimize their fossil fuel mileage, The Verge adds. The RAV4 will also beat the Prius for electric range, hitting up to 50 miles before its gas engine kicks in.
Toyota’s move might not come as a complete surprise given that the automaker already introduced a hybrid-only lineup for its Camry. But given the popularity of the RAV4, Car and Driver notes that “if you ever wondered whether or not hybrids have entered the mainstream yet, perhaps this could be a tipping point.”
Nathan Hurner/USFWS
The Fish Lake Valley tui chub, a small minnow threatened by farming and mining activity, could become the first species to be listed as endangered under the second Trump administration.
The House passed its version of the budget bill early Thursday morning, with even deeper cuts to clean energy added overnight.
Trump’s tax bill passed the House early Thursday morning, after a marathon session in the Rules Committee that began early Wednesday morning and stretched late into the night. The final floor vote came down to the slimmest of margins, 215 yeas to 214 nays, with House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris voting “present.”
The clean energy tax credits, already on life support, barely made it out alive.
The text that now heads to the Senate retains many of the provisions that came out of the Ways and Means Committee last week, but would terminate some of the tax credits even more rapidly to appease Republican hardliners.
It still eliminates the electric vehicle tax credits after this year, except for vehicles produced by automakers that have sold fewer than 200,000 tax credit-qualified cars, which will be eligible for one additional year. It still terminates tax credits for residential energy efficiency, rooftop solar, and new, energy-efficient homes. And it still ends the clean hydrogen tax credit at the end of this year.
But for the clean electricity subsidies, the revised text nixes the previously proposed three-year phase-down schedule and bluntly cuts off any project that doesn’t break ground within 60 days of the bill’s passage — basically the same deal handed to the hydrogen industry.
The only concession to the many objections to the bill from the clean energy industry appears to be some carve outs for nuclear plants.
Here’s a rundown of everything that changed.
The revised text demands that clean power projects start construction within 60 days of the bill’s final passage in order to qualify for the production and investment tax credits, 45Y and 48E. Projects that are able to hit that deadline would also have to meet a second one — they would have to start operating before 2029.
But there’s an exception for advanced nuclear facilities, which would only have to start construction by 2029 to be eligible for the credits and would have no deadline to begin sending power to the grid.
The amended text also speeds up material sourcing requirements that prohibit clean power projects from using anything made in China. Under the earlier iteration, power companies would have had a full year to reorganize their supply chains — a timeline that industry experts already said was unworkable. The revised bill imposes the restriction starting January 1 of next year.
In summary, if you are developing a wind farm and want to qualify for tax credits, you now face an almost impossibly short eligibility timeline. You would have to start construction within two months of the reconciliation package passing, eliminate Chinese goods from your supply chain before the end of the year, and then get your project hooked up to the grid and operating by the end of 2028.
When that 60-day clock starts will depend on how long it takes the Senate to pass its version of the reconciliation bill and both houses to approve the final text, which could take weeks or months. Regardless, these new time restrictions would likely “TANK real projects in active development right now, killing jobs and costing investment,” as industry group Advanced Energy United’s managing director Harry Godfrey posted on social media Wednesday night. Godfrey went on to name six projects in Republican districts, including solar farms, solar on schools, and a long-duration storage installation, that would be affected.
To the few clean energy developers that can hit all of these deadlines, House Republicans have offered a small reward. The revised bill appears to retain transferability, the ability for developers to sell their clean energy tax credits to other companies and thereby access more capital more quickly and easily than they otherwise would. There is some confusion among energy experts, however, about exactly how this provision would apply, with Politico Pro reporting Thursday morning that only nuclear would be able to use it. Regardless, the 60-day deadline to start construction makes this mostly moot.
A new section of text takes aim at companies like Sunrun that lease solar installations to homeowners and businesses. Under current law, Sunrun typically claims the commercial investment tax credit (48E) for solar installations on customers' roofs. But the change would prohibit any company that leases solar or wind installations to a third party from claiming the tax credits for those projects.
Under the Way and Means version of the budget bill, the tax credit for electricity produced by existing nuclear plants would have phased down over three years before terminating in 2032. The revised bill nixes the phase-out, keeping the full amount of the credit in place until 2032, which is just one year earlier than the phase-out timeline in the Inflation Reduction Act.
The revised bill also allows nuclear plant owners to take advantage of transferability for as long as the credit is in effect — a provision that nuclear industry advocates told me was essential to keeping existing plants online.
The text does not make any amendments to the Ways and Means bill’s changes to the carbon capture (45Q), clean fuels (45Z), and advanced manufacturing (45X) projects. These projects would still not be able to use transferability past 2027.
The clean fuels credit would still be extended for four years, through the end of 2031, and come with looser carbon accounting rules. The clean manufacturing credit would still be cut short by a year, with wind manufacturers losing their eligibility even earlier, in 2028.
These provisions are not yet law, and there are a number of Republican Senators who have subtly, though publicly disagreed with the approach the House has taken to paring back the tax credits. Regarding the short timeline the Ways and Means Committee had proposed for claiming the tax credits, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told Politico, “we’ll have to change that.” Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said she expected the “blanket” repeal of the tax credits to change, noting “there has been job creation around these tax credits.” And four Republicans led by Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski also sent a letter to party leadership back in April arguing to maintain the tax credits.
The House appeared to have its clean energy holdouts too, however. But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote on Wednesday, “at no point have these members ever seriously threatened to vote against the bill” in support of the tax credits, and at the end of the day their concerns were mostly ignored.
The Senate is about to take a week-long recess, and won’t be back in session until June 2. How long until the one big, beautiful bill becomes law, nobody knows. But we’ll soon see how hard the energy transition’s defenders are actually willing to fight.
As the process to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts approaches its denouement in the House of Representatives, the relative power of the various Republican factions who could hold up or alter the bill may be finally making itself clear.
And it’s the clean energy tax credit supporters who appear to be the weakest.
Three groups of House Republicans have been the most persistently critical of the emerging framework for the tax and spending bill. There are the members of the House Freedom Caucus, led by Texas Republican Chip Roy, who are fuming about the bill’s impact on the deficit. There are the SALT Republicans, a group whittled down to just five members from New York, New Jersey, and California — blue states all, with all the members from competitive districts — who want to raise the deductibility ceiling for state and local taxes, a.k.a SALT taxes, after it was slashed in 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
And then there are the tax credit defenders, a group of moderate Republicans from largely blue or purple states or districts who want to see at least parts of the Inflation Reduction Act preserved and protected. If that description sounds a lot like the description of the SALT caucus, well, you’re onto something: Every member of the SALT caucus has at one time or another criticized a slash-and-burn approach to dealing with the IRA’s clean energy tax credits.
Both the SALT caucus and the Freedom Caucus have been seen as credible threats to the bill, whose members must be appeased. The SALT caucus stands in a Manchin-esque position, where the five of them together could tank the bill on their own — and where some distance from the Republican party could help them in their districts. For the Freedom Caucus conservatives, the bill presents a pretty clear red line: A handful of them simply do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, which the House language does, and so would have to be appeased with substantial spending cuts.
The SALT caucus appears to have won meaningful concessions, reportedly bringing the deductibility level up to $40,000 for incomes under $500,000. It’s these concessions that seemed to be holding up the bill Wednesday afternoon, as Freedom Caucus members balked over the relative lack of attention their concerns had received. Earlier this week, President Trump was pressuring the SALT caucus to let the bill advance; now he’s putting the screws to the Freedom Caucus. And caught in the middle might be the Inflation Reduction Act.
The solution to bringing the budget harliners on board may be to further fetter and restrict the clean energy tax credits, with Republican leadership reportedly discussing bringing tax credits for projects placed in service after 2028 straight to zero rather than phasing them out gradually.
In the run up to the bill’s drafting, there was much speculation that the core clean energy tax credits of the Inflation Reduction Act could be preserved in large part thanks to the fact that they had sparked investment in Republican congressional districts. In August of last year, well before the presidential election, 18 House Republicans representing a mix of blue states and districts with substantial IRA-linked investments — including Conservative Climate Caucus Vice Chair Buddy Carter’s Savannah, Georgia-based district, with its Hyundai vehicle and battery plant — wrote a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson warning that “prematurely repealing energy tax credits … would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing.” A full repeal, they said, “would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.”
In March, after some election-related turnover, a similar group wrote to House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith that “any proposed changes to the tax code be conducted in a targeted and pragmatic fashion that promotes conference priorities without undoing current and future private sector investments.”
But at no point have these members ever seriously threatened to vote against the bill — not even after Smith’s Ways and Means Committee proposed text that would essentially disembowel the climate law. Even going into Wednesday’s Rules Committee meeting, at least one tax credit supporter, Don Bacon of Nebraska, was leaning towards supporting the bill — hardly the kind of defiance that leads to concessions.
Not that the House IRA’s defenders have been entirely silent. After the Ways and Means Committee released its bill text, a smaller group of House Republicans (14 this time) wrote yet another letter, asking their colleagues to “consider” the effects of accelerating phase-outs, scrapping the ability to sell tax credits on the open market, and pushing out projects’ eligibility for tax credits later in their life cycle. This group, led by Virginia Republican Jen Kiggans, no longer included Buddy Carter, who in the interim had launched a campaign for Jon Ossoff’s Senate seat. It also did not include Mariannette Miller-Meeks, the Iowa Republican who chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus and who had signed the previous letters. Miller-Meeks has always shown special interest in biofuels, which arguably fared the best in the Ways and Means language — the phase-out of the IRA’s biofuel tax credit was extended from 2027 to 2031, winning plaudits from industry.
But these objections were exceedingly polite, especially compared to the Freedom Caucus’ characteristic bluster.
While the legislation is still in flux, it may be that the clean energy caucus, such as it was, contained within it the seeds of its own failure.
Of the five SALT caucus members, four signed on to Kiggans’ letter criticizing the original language altering the tax credits. Now, they appear to have won, or at least reached a deal with the House Republican leadership. And that means more fiscal space in the bill — which may be made up for with even stingier tax credits for clean energy. When the time came for choosing, SALT had to be on the menu.