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:
We didn’t know it was coming. We didn’t know where it came from. We still can’t nail its climate change connection.
What happened?
No, seriously — what happened?
Last week, the American megalopolis, that string of jewels on the old Atlantic coast, found itself shrouded by wildfire smoke. New York City’s air turned ashen and dun, then glowed a supernatural amber. For the first time in who-knows, sightseers standing at the U.S. Capitol Building could not see the Washington Monument, a mile and change down the Mall.
You could list the sports games canceled or flights delayed, but what was oddest about the event was the sheer ubiquity of it. This was one of the few news stories I can remember where you could look up from whatever article you were reading and see the story itself, softly lapping at your window.
And then it was gone. By Friday, the haze had blown out to sea.
It was, in retrospect, a strange time — deeply strange, humblingly strange, strange before almost any other quality. More than 128 million Americans were under an air-quality alert on Wednesday night — roughly the population of Germany and Spain combined — but scarcely 36 hours earlier, nobody had known to prepare for anything worse than a moderate haze. The country’s biggest wildfire-pollution event on record arrived essentially out of nowhere.
Get one great climate story in your inbox every day:
One of the main modes of journalism today — but also, frankly, one of the main frames of our whole cultural apparatus, from TikToks that lightly gloss Wikipedia articles to rampant right-wing conspiracism — is that of the explanation. Everyone explains what’s happening to each other, as it happens, at all times, and therefore makes the world seem rational, empirical, and less frightening. Yet with the wildfire smoke, what is so striking is how little we understood. Nearly every important step in the story was misapprehended as it happened.
We didn’t know that the smoke was coming, for instance. On Tuesday morning, meteorologists predicted that the same moderate haze that has hung around all season would again hit the East Coast. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation put out an alert saying that the air quality index, or AQI, might rise to 150 across the state.
They did not forecast — nobody, as far as I can tell, did — that the worst air pollution in decades would soon wallop the state. By Tuesday night, New York City’s AQI had already reached 174, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. As I walked home in D.C., I could see tendrils of visible smoke hugging the upper stories of apartment buildings.
This prediction failure gave the ensuing response a halting, confused quality. How could such a massive event come out of nowhere? Not until Thursday afternoon — when the smoke had nearly passed — did the federal government advise its workers that they could telework or take vacation time to avoid the bad air. On Friday, New York closed in-person schools, just in time for blue sky to return.
I find it hard to blame them. This was an unprecedented event in part because the fires were so far from where they affected. Everyone had seen the videos of smoke besieging Portland and San Francisco in 2020, but back then, the fires had been near those cities — a couple hundred miles away at most. Where was the smoke coming from now? The Adirondacks were fine. Vermont was’t burning.
Here, we misunderstood again. Many outlets — including this one, at first — initially reported that the smoke came from Nova Scotia, where large and destructive fires had raged the week before. But those fires had been doused over the weekend by some of the same weather pattern that was now ferrying smoke to us. In fact, the smoke had come from the boreal forests of northern Quebec, more than 500 miles from New York City.
Why were these fires raging? Not even Canadians could give a good answer. With fires in Alberta and Nova Scotia gobbling attention and resources, the Quebec fires had seemingly been an afterthought until their smoke blew into Toronto and Ottawa, which happened only a few hours before it arrived in New York. Suddenly, a secondary event had become the main event.
On Wednesday, I talked to a Canadian climatologist who seemed hazy about why Quebec was burning in the first place. “I think this situation is kind of similar to Nova Scotia,” he told me, blaming that province’s warm, dry spring for the blazes. But this explanation — which appeared in many outlets — was only somewhat true: While Quebec had suffered a warm May, it was not in drought.
We did not understand why these fires are burning — and honestly, we still don’t. President Joe Biden said that the smoke provided “another stark reminder of the impacts of climate change.” I am not so sure. There’s no doubt, to be clear, that climate change will make wildfires worse across North America: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that hot, dry “fire weather” will increase throughout the 21st century. But, again, Quebec is not in drought. As for today, no climate-change signal has appeared in eastern Canadian wildfire data. Their connection to climate change is far less clear cut than it is in, say, California’s blazes.
Yet neither would I condescend to someone who does blame climate change here. When something like this happens, how can you not cite the planet’s biggest ongoing physical transformation? If climate change makes flukey weather more likely, shouldn’t we at least consider it being responsible for some of the flukiest weather in decades? The thing about unprecedented events is that you lack precedent for them.
Not that we completely lack an example for this. In 1780, the sun was blotted out across New England. Nocturnal animals came out; people fretted in the streets and abandoned their work; the Connecticut state legislature considered adjourning for doomsday. Not until a decade ago did we finally learn that the “dark day” was caused by Canadian wildfire smoke drifting south.
Which suggests that this might be a once-in-250-year event. But maybe it’s not any more. Maybe with climate change, it’s a once-a-century event. Or a once-in-a-decade event. For now, the sample size is two.
So I wonder: If it wasn’t climate change, would it matter? The pandemic has already taught us that indoor air quality matters, that unseen particles floating in the air can do serious harm. No matter what happens with the climate, Canada is too large and unpopulated to fight every wildfire; neither can it manage the same kind of labor-intensive forest management that California might attempt. East Coasters should come away from our own dark days with new compassion for people out West — and those across the world — who must deal with wildfire smoke on a seasonal basis, not to mention the fires themselves. Regardless of climate change’s role in this fire, it makes wildfires more likely: We should continue to try to decarbonize as fast as we can.
But as for local policy, perhaps our aims should be humbler. We now know (again) that a great cloud of wildfire smoke can blow up on the East Coast at any moment and poison our air. We don’t need to know everything to protect ourselves and our neighbors from that. Air filters cost hundreds of dollars, but not thousands; in new multi-family buildings, they are built into the ventilation system itself. Perhaps the right lesson from this outbreak should be to change our expectations, and think of indoor air filtering like brushing your teeth — a habit essential to our hygiene, to be used by all, and to be provisioned for those who cannot afford one at the public expense.
Maybe that’s prudent climate adaptation. Or maybe — in the wake of COVID, Canadian smoke, and who-knows-what-comes-next — it’s just new common sense.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Republicans are more likely to accuse Democrats, and vice versa, but there are also some surprising areas of agreement.
Electricity is getting more expensive. In the past 12 months, electricity prices have increased more than twice as fast as overall inflation — and the most recent government inflation data, released last week, shows prices are continuing to rise.
The Trump administration knows that power bills are a political liability. In a recent interview with Politico, Energy Secretary Chris Wright affirmed that power prices were rising, but blamed the surge on “momentum” from Biden and Obama-era policies. “That momentum is pushing prices up right now,” he said. But the Trump administration, he continued, is “going to get blamed because we’re in office.”
Is he right? Who do Americans blame for rising power prices?
It might not be who you think.
A new Heatmap Pro poll of more than 3,700 registered voters across the United States finds that Americans tend to look beyond national politics for at least some of the causes of electricity price inflation.
When asked who they blame for rising power prices, Americans are more likely to say that rising energy demand, their local utility, and their state government are to blame than they are to cite the Trump or Biden administrations.
Americans also blame extreme weather and the oil and gas industry at least somewhat for electricity inflation. Only then do they blame a national political party.
Beyond those, other trendy national topics made only a dent in how Americans think about rising power prices. About 28% of Americans said that the construction of new data centers bears “a lot” of the blame for spiking power prices. Forty-three percent of Americans said that the data center buildout should get “a little” of the blame, and about a quarter of Americans said data centers were “not at all” responsible.
The renewable energy industry, which President Trump has claimed is causing the surge, also failed to get much traction among Americans. More than a third of respondents said that renewables were “not at all” responsible for rising electricity prices, while 27% said that they bore “a lot” of responsibility. At the same time, Americans aren’t pinning the increase on tariffs: 40% of registered voters said that in their view, the new trade levies were not the cause of higher bills.
In general, Americans aren’t wrong to look to their state government when thinking about their power bills. Although many states participate in regional electricity markets, electricity is primarily regulated at the state level by public utility commissioners. States really do bear more responsibility for power prices than they do over, say, the price of a loaf of bread — or a gallon of gasoline.
No matter their self-reported political affiliation, Americans still tend to blame their state government, rising demand, and their local utility for rising power bills.
But there are trends. Democrats, of course, are far more likely to blame the Trump administration and Republicans — as well as tariffs — for electricity inflation. Republicans likewise blame the Biden administration and Democrats in much greater numbers.
Nearly 80% of Republicans say the renewable energy industry bears some amount of blame for rising prices, although only 36% of GOP respondents said it bore “a lot” of responsibility. But more than half of Republicans also allocated “a lot” or “a little” blame to the oil and gas industry.
Some causes seemed to unite respondents across the parties. Roughly the same share of Democrats, Republicans, and independents said that the buildout of new data centers was putting upward pressure on power prices.
Independent voters turned to the same big three explanations as other registered voters. But they were much more likely to blame Trump, tariffs, and the oil industry than Republicans were. Only a little more than a quarter of independents said that the renewable energy industry bore “a lot” of the blame for power price spikes as well.
In my reporting, I’ve found that surging investment in the local distribution grid — literally, the small-scale poles, wires, and transformers that get electricity to businesses and households — is the biggest driver of rising power prices. Extreme weather, higher natural gas prices, and — in some markets — rising power demand, especially from data centers, also play a role.
Some experts blame those drivers of higher bills on underlying failures — such as too little oversight from state-level regulators or excessive investment from utilities — that show up in this poll result. But just at a mechanical level, many Americans did cite some of the same causes that utility researchers themselves do. Most Americans, for instance, said that extreme weather and especially “investments in the local electric grid” are driving rising bills, although they didn’t assign it the same prominence that I would. About three quarters of respondents said that those causes bore “a lot” or “a little” of the blame.
Of course, just because rising grid spending, extreme weather, and higher gas prices have driven electricity inflation so far doesn’t mean that they will continue to do so. The Energy Information Administration projects that demand will keep rising, especially if the artificial intelligence boom continues. The Trump administration’s decision to hike taxes on electricity equipment — via tariffs and recent changes in President Trump’s spending bill — may eventually push up costs as well. So too will the Trump administration’s regulatory war on some types of new electricity infrastructure, including offshore wind farms and long-distance transmission lines.
Those policies may eventually hit voters — and their wallets. But right now, Americans aren’t looking at Washington, D.C., when thinking about their power bills.
The Heatmap Pro poll of 3,741 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from August 22 to 29, 2025. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.
Interested in more exclusive polling and insights? Explore Heatmap Pro here.
Current conditions: A prolonged heatwave in Mississippi is breaking nearly century-old temperature records and driving the thermometer up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit again this week • A surge of tropical moisture is steaming the West Coast, with temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than average • Heavy rainfall has set off landslide warnings in every major country in West Africa.
The Trump administration asked a federal judge on Friday to withdraw the Department of the Interior’s approval of a wind farm off the coast of Maryland, Reuters reported. Known as the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, the $6 billion array of as many as 114 turbines in a stretch of federal ocean was set to begin construction next year. Developer US Wind — a joint venture between the investment firm Apollo Global Management and a subsidiary of the Italian industrial giant Toto Holding SpA — had already faced pushback from Republicans. The town of Ocean City sued to overturn the project’s permits at the federal and state levels. When the Interior Department first announced it was reconsidering the permits in August, Mary Beth Carozza, the Republican state senator representing the area, welcomed the move but warned in a statement the news site Maryland Matters cited that opponents’ campaign against the project, known as Stop Offshore Wind, “won’t stop fighting until the Maryland offshore wind project is completely dead.”
It’s all part of President Donald Trump’s widening “war against wind” energy that kicked off the moment he returned to the White House and issued an order halting approvals for new offshore and onshore turbines. If you read the timeline Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo neatly charted out earlier this month, you’ll notice how quickly the administration’s multi-agency crackdown on wind power expanded, particularly after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4. The industry is just starting to push back. As I reported in this newsletter two weeks ago, the owners of the Rhode Island offshore project Revolution Wind that Trump halted unilaterally filed a lawsuit claiming the administration illegally withdrew its already-finalized permits. US Wind said it intends “to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.”
EPA chief Lee Zeldin stands next to Vice President JD Vance. Megan Varner/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed killing the long-standing program requiring thousands of facilities across the country to report the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gas they release into the atmosphere every year. Since 2010, the government has collected the data on emissions from coal-fired plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and other industrial sites, which now represents what The New York Times called “the country’s most comprehensive way to track greenhouse gases.”
The decision could have grave consequences for carbon capture and storage. Some had hoped Trump’s vision of unleashing fossil fuels might spur more investment in the technology to capture emissions before they enter the atmosphere and recycle the gas for industrial use or store it in wells underground. But the mix of hardware, pipelines, and storage sites remains so underdeveloped that the EPA in June said it’s “extremely unlikely that the infrastructure necessary for CCS can be deployed” by the 2032 deadline a previous Biden-era rule had set for equipping fossil fuel plants with carbon capture technology, E&E News reported at the time. Eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program hampers all the federal programs that rely on its data. That includes the carbon capture subsidy, known by its tax code section head 45Q, which Republicans recently dialed up in Trump’s reconciliation law. The rules for claiming the tax credit include filing technical details to the EPA’s emissions program. When Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reached out to the EPA to ask whether gutting the database posed a setback for companies looking to claim the credits, an agency spokesperson pointed him to a line in Friday’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
In a flurry of deals on Sunday night, at least a half-dozen U.S. nuclear companies unveiled plans for new facilities in the United Kingdom as Washington looks to fill order books for its fuel makers and next-generation reactor companies and London looks to ramp up its atomic energy output. Among the deals:
The announcements add to what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called the “nuclear power dealmaking boom.” In a recent paper, policy experts at the center left think tank Third Way concluded that “the U.S. and U.K. are well-suited for further collaboration on nuclear, specifically SMR and Gen IV technologies,” and “could reduce deployment costs through learning rates and commissioning larger order books.”
Nearly a decade of bureaucratic tinkering at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission came to an end so abruptly it’s most succinctly captured in onomatopoeia: “Womp,” Harvard Law School’s electricity law program director Ari Peskoe wrote on X. “With one paragraph, FERC ends a 7.5-year effort to update its approach to reviewing proposed interstate gas pipelines.” The measure would have implemented a new formula for assessing the value of new interstate gas lines that would have weighted the environment more heavily than the existing methodology, which was written in 1999. But the push to modernize the criteria after three decades “was never a serious effort,” former FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee posted on X. “We got bullied into starting it and put on a show for years to hold protesters at bay. Just being honest. R and D led @ferc majorities both faked it.”
Ram has canceled its electric pickup truck, long expected to be a competitor to the battery-powered versions of the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet Silverado, InsideEVs reported. Parent company Stellantis said it would discontinue the 2026 battery-powered Ram 1500 REV “as demand for full-size battery-electric trucks slows in North America.” Rivals such as GM have seen a boom in EV sales in recent months, that is likely driven by the law Trump signed that rapidly phased out federal tax credits after this month. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently, August turned out to be the best month for EV sales “in U.S. history, with just over 146,000 units sold, comprising almost 10% of total car sales that month.” Ford is still investing in what is billed as a Model T moment for EV construction. And, as I have reported here in this newsletter, Tesla’s plunge in popularity — even with former customers — has opened up more of the EV market to other vendors.
Though Ram’s all-electric pickup truck turned out to be a non-starter, its extended-range battery electric truck, formerly known as the Ramcharger, will now take on the 1500 REV moniker with a 2026 launch date. As Heatmap contributor and Shift Key podcast cohost Jesse Jenkins wrote when the Ramcharger was announced, “The economics and capabilities of a range-extended EV thus make a lot of sense, especially for massive vehicles like the full-size trucks and SUVs so many Americans love. And they squash any concerns about range anxiety that might give buyers pause.”
Scientists have long sought an economical way to harness renewable power from waves. But as Julian Spector wrote in Canary Media: “The first rule of wave power startups is that they always fail. But a plucky company called Eco Wave Power is doing its best to prove that rule wrong, and it just notched an important win in Los Angeles.” The company this month installed a 100-kilowatt system on a concrete wharf in the port of Los Angeles, with seven steel floaters affixed to a central structure that bobs in the waves, “building up hydraulic pressure that gets converted to electric power by machinery in shipping containers on shore.” If the pilot pans out and Eco Wave gets a chance to bid on a larger area of the port, the technology could — at least in theory — generate power 90% of the time, supplying electrons at a capacity factor higher than almost any other energy source besides nuclear.
Why killing a government climate database could essentially gut a tax credit
The Trump administration’s bid to end an Environmental Protection Agency program may essentially block any company — even an oil firm — from accessing federal subsidies for capturing carbon or producing hydrogen fuel.
On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed that it would stop collecting and publishing greenhouse gas emissions data from thousands of refineries, power plants, and factories across the country.
The Trump administration argues that the scheme, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, costs more than $2 billion and isn’t legally required under the Clean Air Act. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, described the program as “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”
But the program is more important than the Trump administration lets on. It’s true that the policy, which required more than 8,000 different facilities around the country to report their emissions, helped the EPA and outside analysts estimate the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
But it did more than that. Over the past decade, the program had essentially become the master database of carbon pollution and emissions policy across the American economy. “Essentially everything the federal government does related to emissions reductions is dependent on the [Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program],” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me.
That means other federal programs — including those that Republicans in Congress have championed — have come to rely on the EPA database.
Among those programs: the federal tax credit for capturing and using carbon dioxide. Republicans recently increased the size of that subsidy, nicknamed 45Q after a section of the tax code, for companies that turn captured carbon into another product or use it to make oil wells more productive. Those changes were passed in President Trump’s big tax and spending law over the summer.
But Zeldin’s scheme to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program would place that subsidy off limits for the foreseeable future. Under federal law, companies can only claim the 45Q tax credit if they file technical details to the EPA’s emissions reporting program.
Another federal tax credit, for companies that use carbon capture to produce hydrogen fuel, also depends on the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. That subsidy hasn’t received the same friendly treatment from Republicans, and it will now phase out in 2028.
The EPA program is “the primary mechanism by which companies investing in and deploying carbon capture and hydrogen projects quantify the CO2 that they’re sequestering, such that they qualify for tax incentives,” Jane Flegal, a former Biden administration appointee who worked on industrial emissions policy, told me. She is now the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation.
“The only way for private capital to be put to work to deploy American carbon capture and hydrogen projects is to quantify the carbon dioxide that they’re sequestering, in some way,” she added. That’s what the EPA program does: It confirms that companies are storing or using as much carbon as they claim they are to the IRS.
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is “how the IRS communicates with the EPA” when companies claim the 45Q credit, Cavanaugh said. “The IRS obviously has taxpayer-sensitive information, so they’re not able to give information to the EPA about who or what is claiming the credit.” The existence of the database lets the EPA then automatically provide information to the IRS, so that no confidential tax information is disclosed.
Zeldin’s announcement that the EPA would phase out the program has alarmed companies planning on using the tax credit. In a statement, the Carbon Capture Coalition — an alliance of oil companies, manufacturers, startups, and NGOs — called the reporting program the “regulatory backbone” of the carbon capture tax credit.
“It is not an understatement that the long-term success of the carbon management industry rests on the robust reporting mechanisms” in the EPA’s program, the group said.
Killing the EPA program could hurt American companies in other ways. Right now, companies that trade with European firms depend on the EPA data to pass muster with the EU’s carbon border adjustment tax. It’s unclear how they would fare in a world with no EPA data.
It could also sideline GOP proposals. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, has suggested that imports to the United States should pay a foreign pollution fee — essentially, a way of accounting for the implicit subsidy of China’s dirty energy system. But the data to comply with that law would likely come from the EPA’s greenhouse gas database, too.
Ending the EPA database wouldn’t necessarily spell permanent doom for the carbon capture tax credit, but it would make it much harder to use in the years to come. In order to re-open the tax credit for applications, the Treasury Department, the Energy Department, the Interior Department, and the EPA would have to write new rules for companies that claim the 45Q credit. These rules would go to the end of the long list of regulations that the Treasury Department must write after Trump’s spending law transformed the tax code.
That could take years — and it could sideline projects now under construction. “There are now billions of dollars being invested by the private sector and the government in these technologies, where the U.S. is positioned to lead globally,” Flegal said. Changing the rules would “undermine any way for the companies to succeed.”
Ditching the EPA database, however, very well could doom carbon capture-based hydrogen projects. Under the terms of Trump’s tax law, companies that want to claim the hydrogen credit must begin construction on their projects by 2028.
The Trump administration seems to believe, too, that gutting the EPA database may require new rules for the carbon capture tax credit. When asked for comment, an EPA spokesperson pointed me to a line in the agency’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
The EPA spokesperson then encouraged me to ask the Treasury Department for anything more about “specific implications.”