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On the mess in Nantucket, Biden’s big decision, and electricity demand
Current conditions: A raging wildfire disrupted traffic at Turkey’s Izmir airport • The North Central Plains are on alert for severe thunderstorms • It’s about 70 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where President Biden is self-isolating with COVID.
With reports swirling that President Biden is likely to announce his departure from the 2024 presidential race this weekend, Reuters says that climate groups are “split” on the issue. The outlet contacted eight environmental groups for their take on whether Biden should step aside. Two (the Sunrise Movement and Climate Defiance) said yes. One (the Sierra Club) said no. The others were undecided or didn’t want to comment. “Joe Biden’s inability to campaign coherently and articulate an alternative to the far right will result in lower turnout among potential Democratic voters faced with a choice between two old white men clinging to power,” said Evan Drukker-Schardl, an organizer with Climate Defiance.
“If you like this summer’s heat, I have some good news for you,” quipped climatologist Brian Brettschneider after seeing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s monthly temperature and precipitation outlook for August. It’s expected to be hotter than normal across the vast majority of the contiguous United States next month. That’s looking especially certain for the north-central Rockies (Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah) and the Central Applachians (West Virginia and the Carolinas). As for rain, it’ll likely be dryer than normal out West, and wetter than normal in the Southeast.
NOAA
The more immediate forecast brings some relief from stifling heat in northeastern states, but the western U.S. will bake this weekend and the Pacific Northwest could see 110 degrees by Sunday.
Another large chunk of the Vineyard Wind farm’s damaged turbine broke off and fell into the ocean yesterday. A blade sustained damage over the weekend and foam and fiberglass debris has been washing up on Nantucket beaches. Thursday’s incident involved “a significant part” of what remained of the blade, Vineyard Wind said in a statement. The company said the blade had settled on the ocean floor. Vineyard’s CEO Klaus Moeller found out about the new damage during a particularly tense meeting with outraged Nantucket community members, during which he tried (but failed) to reassure them the debris is not toxic.
Cleanup crews are trying to collect the debris but “current weather conditions create a difficult working environment.” Apparently this isn’t the first time a turbine manufactured by GE Verona has broken apart. There have been reports of similar incidents in the U.K., Germany, and Sweden in recent years. Vineyard Wind has halted all operations while an investigation goes ahead.
Clean energy expansion needs to speed up to keep pace with the growing demand for electricity, according to a mid-year electricity update from the International Energy Agency. Key takeaways from the forecast:
While we’re “heading fast towards an electric future,” said Dave Jones, insight director at energy think tank Ember, “we need to be building renewables at double speed, to make power sector emissions fall as fast as they need to.”
IEA
Five protesters from the climate activist group Just Stop Oil have been jailed in the U.K. for blocking a major roadway in 2022. Four of them were sentenced to four years, and one got five years. The judge in the case said they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.” The sentences are thought to be the longest ever given in the U.K. for non-violent protest, The Guardianreported. The program director of Greenpeace slammed the decision, saying: “We’re giving a free hand to the polluting elite robbing us of a habitable planet while jailing those who’re trying to stop them – it makes no sense.”
Spending on EV charging infrastructure in the U.S. is expected to surpass $6 billion this year, which is double the investment seen in 2023.
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On deregulation, climate grants, and green infrastructure
Current conditions: Health officials in Mumbai are warning vulnerable residents to take care as temperatures hover around 104 degrees Fahrenheit • Storm Konrad is battering Portugal and Spain with torrential rain • Cloudy weather is likely to spoil many Americans’ plans to catch tomorrow morning’s lunar eclipse.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin yesterday launched an attack on U.S. environmental regulations, announcing a review of dozens of agency rules aimed at safeguarding the water and air, and the health of all Americans. In what he called the “biggest deregulation action in U.S. history,” Zeldin said he was “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” in the name of unleashing American energy and bringing down costs. As The New York Timesnoted, Zeldin’s announcement did not once refer to protecting the environment or public health, “twin tenets that have guided the agency since its founding in 1970.”
Among the many rules and regulations up for reconsideration are:
Environmental advocates swiftly and forcefully condemned the announcement. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy called it “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”
Amanda Leland, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund, said “those seeking to make America healthier should be deeply concerned.”
Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said “the EPA has officially abandoned its mission to protect health and the environment.”
“The scale and scope and speed with which this administration is attacking environmental safeguards is unprecedented,” Jason Rylander, the legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute told NBC News.
One of the EPA’s most concerning announcements is its plan to reconsider the agency’s 2009 science-backed conclusion that six planet-warming gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, are a danger to public health. This finding is the basis for federal climate regulations, and gutting it would significantly curb the EPA’s ability to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Any attempt by the EPA to undo the endangerment finding will no doubt be met by legal challenges, and the agency would face an uphill battle to demonstrate that greenhouse gases are not a public health threat. “You’ve got to explain away decades of statements by every administration that there are negative consequences of climate change that can be reasonably anticipated,” Jonathan H. Adler, a conservative legal expert and professor of environmental law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told the Times.
There are a few updates on the Trump administration’s escalating battle against nonprofits that were granted some $20 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Documents show that Citibank, where the money was parked, was told to freeze the funds by the FBI, and the FBI is investigating the nonprofits for possible criminal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Earlier this week, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he had terminated the funds, which had been approved by Congress. Several of the grantees have launched lawsuits against the EPA and Citibank.
Yesterday a judge in one of the cases gave the administration until Monday to present evidence of fraud, waste, or abuse that justifies terminating the grant contracts. “You can’t even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan told a lawyer for the Trump administration during a hearing. “You have to have some kind of evidence.”
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The Department of Transportation has reportedly told its officials to pause green infrastructure projects funded by Biden-era grants while the agency scrutinizes them to determine whether they “advance climate, equity, and other priorities counter to the administration's executive orders.” The review will identify for cancellation any projects aimed at “equity analysis, green infrastructure, bicycle infrastructure [and] EV and/or EV-charging infrastructure.”
In case you missed it: Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported yesterday. The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations. More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership. “A major chapter in climate giving has ended,” Meyer said.
A new four-lane highway is being carved through Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to make way for an influx of traffic from the COP30 climate summit in Belém later this year.
Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.