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On the rise of renewables, peak oil, and carbon capture
Current conditions: More than 10 inches of rain fell over nine hours in southwestern China • Wildfires are spreading in Canada, with at least 140 burning as of yesterday afternoon • The streets of Cape Town in South Africa are under water after severe storms caused widespread flooding.
More electricity was generated by wind and solar than by nuclear plants in the first half of 2024 for the first time ever in U.S. history, Reuters reported, citing data from energy think tank Ember. Solar and wind farms generated 401.4 terawatt hours (TWh) compared to 390.5 TWh generated from nuclear reactors, setting 2024 on pace to be the “first full year when more U.S. electricity will come from renewables than from any other form of clean power.” It’s helpful to compare these numbers to the same period last year, when nuclear generated 9% more power than solar and wind. Solar saw the greatest gains, with output 30% higher in the first half of 2024 compared to 2023; wind generation was up 10% and nuclear was up just 3.4%. Between 2018 and 2023, installed capacity grew by 168% for utility solar and 56% for wind. Meanwhile, nuclear generation capacity dropped by 4%.
In its latest energy outlook report, fossil fuel giant BP forecasts that global demand for oil will peak in 2025, and the related carbon emissions will, too. The analysis is based on current climate policies and pledges, growing efficiency standards for the internal combustion engine and a rise in electric vehicles, and rapid expansion of renewables. By 2050, oil’s share of the energy mix is predicted to fall to about 25%, and that would decrease even more, to just 10%, if nations strengthen (and follow through on) their climate pledges to better align with the Paris Agreement.
BP
The report notes that energy demand is rising, and says the world must enter an “energy substitution” phase in which clean energy supply increases quickly to keep up while also allowing for fossil fuels to be phased out. “The longer it takes for the world to move to a rapid and sustained energy transition, the greater the risk of a costly and disorderly adjustment pathway in the future,” wrote Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist.
More than 160 million Americans have been under excessive heat warnings this week. The heat is particularly oppressive in the West, where temperature records have been falling and heat-related deaths are rising. At least 28 people have died due to heat in the last week, and that number is expected to climb, especially as the heat wave persists into next week.
NWS/NOAA
Las Vegas recorded five days a row where temperatures soared above 115 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking a record of four days set in 2005. On Sunday the city hit 120 degrees, a new record for the hottest day. It will be 118 degrees there today. “This is the most extreme heatwave in the history of record-keeping in Las Vegas since 1937,” Nevada National Weather Service meteorologist John Adair told The Associated Press. In California, the weather has been so hot that emergency rescue helicopters are struggling to fly.
Human-caused climate change is making heat waves more intense and more frequent. “While this summer is likely to be one of the hottest on record, it is important to realize that it may also be one of the coldest summers of the future,” wrote climate scientist Mathew Barlow and meteorology professor Jeffrey Basara in an essay for The Conversation.
Climate change advocacy group Evergreen Action reviewed President Biden’s record of following through on climate actions over the last four years. In 2020, the group put forward a comprehensive set of policy recommendations for Biden to use as a roadmap. The new analysis finds that the administration has “made progress” on 85% of those recommendations, including implementing new clean power policies, advancing environmental justice, the creation of the American Climate Corps, and trying to restrict liquefied natural gas exports. “The Biden-Harris administration has done more on climate than any president before,” Evergreen said. It’s worth reviewing the entire list of recommendations.
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A carbon capture company named 280 Earth has signed agreements worth $40 million to remove 61,600 tons of the greenhouse gas between now and 2030, Bloomberg reported. The company emerged from Alphabet’s moonshot factory and recently launched direct air capture operations at its plant in Oregon. The plant is located next to a Google data center and can use excess heat from that center to “improve its efficiency, while cutting the center’s cooling costs,” according to Bloomberg. The company’s website says it plans to build more facilities across the United States. It recently raised $50 million from private investors in a Series B round.
“Biden’s tremendous climate legacy rests on whether he can sell his accomplishments to the public and win the 2024 election. And that ability is faltering, to say the least.” –Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer
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“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.
Predicting the location and severity of thunderstorms is at the cutting edge of weather science. Now funding for that science is at risk.
Tropical Storm Barry was, by all measures, a boring storm. “Blink and you missed it,” as a piece in Yale Climate Connections put it after Barry formed, then dissipated over 24 hours in late June, having never sustained wind speeds higher than 45 miles per hour. The tropical storm’s main impact, it seemed at the time, was “heavy rains of three to six inches, which likely caused minor flooding” in Tampico, Mexico, where it made landfall.
But a few days later, U.S. meteorologists started to get concerned. The remnants of Barry had swirled northward, pooling wet Gulf air over southern and central Texas and elevating the atmospheric moisture to reach or exceed record levels for July. “Like a waterlogged sponge perched precariously overhead, all the atmosphere needed was a catalyst to wring out the extreme levels of water vapor,” meteorologist Mike Lowry wrote.
More than 100 people — many of them children — ultimately died as extreme rainfall caused the Guadalupe River to rise 34 feet in 90 minutes. But the tragedy was “not really a failure of meteorology,” UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist Daniel Swain said during a public “Office Hours” review of the disaster on Monday. The National Weather Service in San Antonio and Austin first warned the public of the potential for heavy rain on Sunday, June 29 — five days before the floods crested. The agency followed that with a flood watch warning for the Kerrville area on Thursday, July 3, then issued an additional 21 warnings, culminating just after 1 a.m. on Friday, July 4, with a wireless emergency alert sent to the phones of residents, campers, and RVers along the Guadalupe River.
The NWS alerts were both timely and accurate, and even correctly predicted an expected rainfall rate of 2 to 3 inches per hour. If it were possible to consider the science alone, the official response might have been deemed a success.
Of all the storm systems, convective storms — like thunderstorms, hail, tornadoes, and extreme rainstorms — are some of the most difficult to forecast. “We don’t have very good observations of some of these fine-scale weather extremes,” Swain told me after office hours were over, in reference to severe meteorological events that are often relatively short-lived and occur in small geographic areas. “We only know a tornado occurred, for example, if people report it and the Weather Service meteorologists go out afterward and look to see if there’s a circular, radial damage pattern.” A hurricane, by contrast, spans hundreds of miles and is visible from space.
Global weather models, which predict conditions at a planetary scale, are relatively coarse in their spatial resolution and “did not do the best job with this event,” Swain said during his office hours. “They predicted some rain, locally heavy, but nothing anywhere near what transpired.” (And before you ask — artificial intelligence-powered weather models were among the worst at predicting the Texas floods.)
Over the past decade or so, however, due to the unique convective storm risks in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other meteorological agencies have developed specialized high resolution convection-resolving models to better represent and forecast extreme thunderstorms and rainstorms.
NOAA’s cutting-edge specialized models “got this right,” Swain told me of the Texas storms. “Those were the models that alerted the local weather service and the NOAA Weather Prediction Center of the potential for an extreme rain event. That is why the flash flood watches were issued so early, and why there was so much advanced knowledge.”
Writing for The Eyewall, meteorologist Matt Lanza concurred with Swain’s assessment: “By Thursday morning, the [high resolution] model showed as much as 10 to 13 inches in parts of Texas,” he wrote. “By Thursday evening, that was as much as 20 inches. So the [high resolution] model upped the ante all day.”
Most models initialized at 00Z last night indicated the potential for localized excessive rainfall over portions of south-central Texas that led to the tragic and deadly flash flood early this morning. pic.twitter.com/t3DpCfc7dX
— Jeff Frame (@VORTEXJeff) July 4, 2025
To be any more accurate than they ultimately were on the Texas floods, meteorologists would have needed the ability to predict the precise location and volume of rainfall of an individual thunderstorm cell. Although models can provide a fairly accurate picture of the general area where a storm will form, the best current science still can’t achieve that level of precision more than a few hours in advance of a given event.
Climate change itself is another factor making storm behavior even less predictable. “If it weren’t so hot outside, if it wasn’t so humid, if the atmosphere wasn’t holding all that water, then [the system] would have rained and marched along as the storm drifted,” Claudia Benitez-Nelson, an expert on flooding at the University of South Carolina, told me. Instead, slow and low prevailing winds caused the system to stall, pinning it over the same worst-case-scenario location at the confluence of the Hill Country rivers for hours and challenging the limits of science and forecasting.
Though it’s tempting to blame the Trump administration cuts to the staff and budget of the NWS for the tragedy, the local NWS actually had more forecasters on hand than usual in its local field office ahead of the storm, in anticipation of potential disaster. Any budget cuts to the NWS, while potentially disastrous, would not go into effect until fiscal year 2026.
The proposed 2026 budget for NOAA, however, would zero out the upkeep of the models, as well as shutter the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, which studies thunderstorms and rainstorms, such as the one in Texas. And due to the proprietary, U.S.-specific nature of the high-resolution models, there is no one coming to our rescue if they’re eliminated or degraded by the cuts.
The impending cuts are alarming to the scientists charged with maintaining and adjusting the models to ensure maximum accuracy, too. Computationally, it’s no small task to keep them running 24 hours a day, every day of the year. A weather model doesn’t simply run on its own indefinitely, but rather requires large data transfers as well as intakes of new conditions from its network of observation stations to remain reliable. Although the NOAA high-resolution models have been in use for about a decade, yearly updates keep the programs on the cutting edge of weather science; without constant tweaks, the models’ accuracy slowly degrades as the atmosphere changes and information and technologies become outdated.
It’s difficult to imagine that the Texas floods could have been more catastrophic, and yet the NOAA models and NWS warnings and alerts undoubtedly saved lives. Still, local Texas authorities have attempted to pass the blame, claiming they weren’t adequately informed of the dangers by forecasters. The picture will become clearer as reporting continues to probe why the flood-prone region did not have warning sirens, why camp counselors did not have their phones to receive overnight NWS alarms, why there were not more flood gauges on the rivers, and what, if anything, local officials could have done to save more people. Still, given what is scientifically possible at this stage of modeling, “This was not a forecast failure relative to scientific or weather prediction best practices. That much is clear,” Swain said.
As the climate warms and extreme rainfall events increase as a result, however, it will become ever more crucial to have access to cutting-edge weather models. “What I want to bring attention to is that this is not a one-off,” Benitez-Nelson, the flood expert at the University of South Carolina, told me. “There’s this temptation to say, ‘Oh, it’s a 100-year storm, it’s a 1,000-year storm.’”
“No,” she went on. “This is a growing pattern.”
On the Texas floods, wind and solar restrictions, and an executive order
Current conditions: An extreme heat warning is in place for Phoenix, which could reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit today • Flooding in central North Carolina has killed at least one person after two months’ worth of rain fell in 24 hours • Parts of the U.K. this week will experience their third heatwave in less than a month.
The catastrophic flooding in central Texas that claimed more than 100 lives late last week was intensified by human-driven climate change, according to a rapid attribution report by ClimaMeter, an experimental framework funded by the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research. The researchers compared historic and contemporary weather patterns in Texas’ Hill Country and found that conditions going into Fourth of July weekend were up to 7% wetter than during similar events in the past. “These results suggest that meteorological conditions similar to those of the July 2025 Texas floods are becoming more favorable for extreme precipitation, in line with what would be expected under continued global warming,” the researchers wrote, concluding that “natural variability alone cannot explain the changes in precipitation associated with this very exceptional meteorological condition.”
The development of new wind and solar power plants is “now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country,” according to a major new survey of public records and local ordinances by my colleagues Robinson Meyer and Charlie Clynes. Their report found bans and restrictions — such as a rule that wind turbines must be placed a certain number of miles from homes, or that solar farms cannot take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land — in a total of 605 U.S. counties, including at least 59 municipalities in the more-renewables-friendly Northeast. In total, the bans and restrictions on renewables cover approximately 17% of the continental United States’ total land mass.
Robinson and Charlie’s findings have not been previously reported, and their research involved calling thousands of counties where laws, in some cases, were not in existing public databases. You can access the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments via Heatmap Pro, here.
In an executive order on Monday, President Trump directed the Treasury Department to issue “new and revised guidance” restricting which projects will still qualify for wind and solar tax credits. The order builds on the repeal of renewable energy tax credits in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which had stipulated that such projects would need to begin construction within a year and come online by 2028 to be eligible for the subsidies. Now the government will take a stricter approach to defining “the beginning of construction” to prevent “the artificial acceleration or manipulation of eligibility” by limiting credits to projects in which “a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
Freedom Caucus members had described the tax credits as a sticking point during their late negotiations over the bill. As my colleagues Jael Holzman and Katie Brigham previously reported, North Carolina Republican Representative Ralph Norman alluded to a conversation with Trump in which the president had assured him that he was “going to deal with [the tax credits] in his own way.” It appears the executive order is the follow-through on that promise. Additionally, Trump’s executive order called for the Department of the Interior to determine whether any of its policies, practices, or regulations “provide preferential treatment to wind and solar facilities in comparison to dispatchable energy sources” and revise them accordingly.
An Energy Department report released Monday warned that blackouts in the U.S. could “increase by 100% in 2030” if the country continues to close its coal and natural gas power plants. The report, completed at the direction of an April executive order by President Trump, anticipates 209 gigawatts of new generation by 2030 to replace 104 gigawatts of retirements — but “only 22 gigawatts would come from firm baseload generation sources,” so that, “even assuming no retirements, the model found increased risk of outages in 2030 by a factor of 34.” The DOE concluded that the U.S. grid “will not be able to sustain the combined impact of coal and other plant closures, an overreliance on intermittent energy sources like wind and solar, and data center growth, highlighting the urgency of increasing dispatchable energy output.”
The DOE’s report sets the stage for the department to continue to prevent the phase-out of old fossil fuel power plants and open new facilities. Many are skeptical of the agency’s logic, however, pointing to renewable-heavy grid success stories like Texas. The Department of Energy “appears to exaggerate the risk of blackouts and undervalue the contributions of entire resource classes, like wind, solar, and battery storage,” Caitlin Marquis, the managing director at Advanced Energy United, said, per Axios.
On Monday, the Trump administration sent letters to 14 countries warning them they’ll face tariffs of up to 40% if they don’t reach a trade deal with the U.S. by an August 1 deadline. Significantly, automaking giants Japan and South Korea — which each account for about 4% of U.S. imports, per The New York Times — were among the recipients, and face 25% tariffs according to the letters. As my colleague Jael Holzman previously reported, Japan in particular had been “positioned to be an ally in U.S. efforts to wean off China-linked minerals and signed a minerals trade agreement under Biden,” with the imposition of such tariffs potentially threatening to tank America’s own “mineral supply chain renaissance.”
Tom Nicholson/Getty Images
The Seine River opened for swimming last weekend for the first time since 1923, following an extensive effort to upgrade the city’s sewer systems and water treatment facilities. “I never imagined being in the water close to the Eiffel Tower,” one swimmer told Reuters.