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The Oscar-winner and El Capitan free solo-er talks to Heatmap about solar panels, fatherhood, and his new docuseries, Arctic Ascent.
In 2017, rock climber Alex Honnold went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote Free Solo, the then-new documentary about his unassisted climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan. “Is there anything bigger than that?” Kimmel prompted as a closing question.
“I mean, there are technically some bigger walls in the world,” Honnold said. “But they’re in very remote places — like Greenland.”
Five years and an Oscar later, Honnold was scrambling off a boat at the base of Ingmikortilaq, a crumbly sea cliff that towers nearly 1,000 feet higher than El Cap over an iceberg-ridden fjord in eastern Greenland. His intended first ascent was the culmination of a six-week adventure across ice fields and glaciers.
This time, Honnold wasn’t alone. The Greenland expedition included two other legendary climbers, Hazel Findlay and Mikey Schaefer, as well as Aldo Kane, who provided safety and technical support; Adam Kjeldsen, a Greenlandic guide; and perhaps most surprisingly, Heïdi Sevestre, a Frenchglaciologist who helped set up or run 16 different studies to collect data for scientists around the world.
The team’s adventure is captured in Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold, a three-part docuseries that premieres on Hulu and Disney+ on February 5. Ahead of its release, I spoke separately with Honnold and Sevestre about the expedition, the importance of climate science, and their respective climbs. (While Sevestre, previously a non-climber, didn’t attempt Ingmikortilaq, she did scale a 1,500-foot rock face known as the Pool Wall while drilling rock cores for samples.) Our conversations have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Unlike a lot of other outdoor sports like mountaineering or skiing or even surfing, rock climbing doesn’t seem as obviously imperiled by climate change. How did this become the cause you wanted to devote your time and money to?
Oh, I think climbing is more imperiled by climate change than most other sports. I mean, you’re right that maybe it’s not as impactful as to skiing, but it’s way more impactful than almost every other sport.
You’re still in the mountains. Wildfire smoke every summer — that’s now a thing that just didn’t exist when I was growing up climbing. Even if you’re just rock climbing, you’re always approaching in the mountains. Nowadays, most couloirs [chutes between rocks that might typically fill with snow in the winter] have melted out. Stable snow fields that have existed for generations are now melted out. Piles of teetering rubble are falling down mountainsides, and also a lot of routes are just less safe. The mountainsides themselves are collapsing, like the Aiguille du Midi gondola in Chamonix. Which, actually — one of the things we were installing in Greenland were temperature sensors on one of the cliffs, related to studying how rocks thaw out, what happens when permafrost melts. I would say that climate change is still incredibly relevant for us.
Your way into climate was through your climbing, then?
A big part of my environmental awareness in general is because of the experiences I’ve had outdoors as a climber. But long before [the Greenland expedition], I started a foundation in 2012 where I’ve been supporting community solar projects around the world and caring about the transition to renewables. I’ve cared about climate change forever. I think this was just the first opportunity to do it on mainstream television.
I saw that Arctic Ascent purchased carbon credits to compensate for production emissions. I was hoping you could talk about that decision, and how else you might have minimized your impact on the expedition, since I don’t think people are aware of how energy intensive film and TV productions can be.
In this case, other than the obvious expense of all of our flights getting to Greenland, we had a relatively low carbon footprint because we were camping the whole time. I think you’re right that a lot of television is kind of insane when you have all the RVs and everyone’s in their own thing and there’s hair and makeup and it’s just crazy with, like, a million cameras. In this case, it was basically a bunch of people camping on a glacier for six weeks, so it’s not quite the same as a Hollywood set.
But yeah, I think the idea to purchase offsets was the obvious bare minimum for a project like this. If you’re going to be doing a whole story around sea level rise, you have to do something.
The Honnold Foundation focuses on bringing solar panels to vulnerable communities, but these are fairly small projects compared to the expansive solar farms we might more traditionally think of. Why did you choose to focus your time on something that might seem, at least on paper, to be of a smaller scale than, say, electrifying the grid?
It’s a totally fair question. In 2012, it wasn’t totally clear that the world was transitioning to renewables at all. It seemed like it was inevitable, but you’re never really sure — you know, back then people were into hydrogen and you’re like, “Oh, maybe we’re going to have hydrogen cars, or maybe battery electric really takes off,” blah, blah, blah. Anyway, now it seems totally clear that the world is transitioning to renewables. Within some timeframe, like 20 to 50 years, the world will be 100% renewable.
The thing is, we currently live in a world where something like a billion people don’t have access to power, and transitioning to renewables will still leave us in a world where a billion people don’t have access to power. [Editor’s note: The number of people living without electricity today is actually closer to 760 million.] As the system changes, there are so many people who are left behind. What the Honnold Foundation tries to do is find that sweet spot in helping with the transition, helping the people who are being left behind.
Part of that is just by necessity — I’m a professional rock climber, I’m not a tech billionaire. So the small-scale grants just make more sense to some extent, but they also have the biggest impact on human lives because when you do these small-scale projects, you can fundamentally change the way people live. That’s a huge impact.
I live in Las Vegas, and you see huge solar farms around the desert. It’s great; the grid is going 100% renewable. I’m into that. But realistically, the only difference it makes in most people’s lives is maybe a small change in their utility rate. Really, the people that benefit are the utility shareholders — it’s some Warren Buffett-owned utility in my case, NV Energy. That really isn’t that inspiring. This is my long rant to say that the Honnold Foundation is trying to help the humans who need it the most.
Did you get a chance to use solar panels on the Greenland expedition?
On this trip, no, because they were running a generator for production and it was charging, like, 50 batteries.
It’s funny because we did an expedition in Antarctica where we made a little climbing film as well. And on that trip, they planned to take a generator and then somebody just forgot the fuel. So we got there and we were like, “Oh, no,” and we wound up doing the whole trip off solar and it totally worked.
This was your first expedition since becoming a father. You’ve worked on the climate cause for a long time now, but I’m curious if your perspective has changed at all since your daughter June joined your family — and I know you have another daughter on the way!
Yeah, soon! No, I don’t think my perspective has changed too much. I’ve always cared about these kinds of issues. The bigger change is in the way that I spend my time. Having a family forces me to be a little bit tighter about the choices that I’m making, what expeditions I choose to go on. That makes a trip like this even more worthwhile, where you get to do great climbing and there’s a real purpose behind it, and you get to share important knowledge about things that matter.
Can you tell me a little more about the decision to bring Heïdi on board? I heard her version of the story earlier this week but I’m curious about how you found her and roped her in.
Isn’t she so amazing?
She was delightful!
That’s the thing with Heïdi. Because when you spend time with her, she just makes you care about about ice. And I don’t even like ice. It’s not my thing; I like rocks. But she made me much more knowledgeable and much more caring about that type of world.
Do you consider yourself an optimist when it comes to climate change?
I think so, which is weird because I’m optimistic despite all the data to the contrary. I understand the predictions, but there’s so much to gain. So far it’s been 20 years that I’ve been reading environmental nonfiction and we haven’t really chosen to make anything of this opportunity, but we still have this incredible opportunity to build a better world to live in, a cleaner world. We can still choose that at any point. And I just keep thinking that at some point, we’re going to choose it. You can’t keep ignoring the obvious thing forever.
How did you get involved in the Arctic Ascent expedition?
This was an absolute dream come true for me — I felt extremely lucky to get a call from the team. It is extremely challenging to go to that one remote location, one of the least studied places on Earth. But Alex, as you know, is a firm believer in the scientific work. The planets really aligned. It took about a year prior to the expedition to design the work we could do with boots on the ground.
I wanted to know what it was like to put together scientific objectives for an expedition like this. It’s a little bit unconventional because there’s a film crew and there was climbing involved.
I think it was extremely brave and extremely daring of the entire team to have the willingness to invite the scientists on board. Because not only did we have the best climbers in the world climbing in a very challenging and hostile environment, we’re also filming a series of documentaries and we have to do some of the very best possible science. So it’s not that easy! But what we did is, we took it step by step. We contacted all the universities and labs and institutions interested in data from this part of the world — and also interested in training me on how to collect this data. Because I really felt — it’s what I was thinking the whole time — I really felt like I was an astronaut on the ISS. I was the only one, and I had to do the best possible work.
We ended up with 16 different protocols to do on this expedition, so it was really major. And, you know, we worked with NASA, we worked with research institutes in Denmark, the University of Buffalo, and the University of Kansas, for example. So it was challenging but a dream come true to be trusted by the scientists.
Your first big polar expedition was actually to Greenland, back in 2011. Had you been back to the island between that research trip and this one?
I had spent a tiny bit of time — not so far in the field as East Greenland, but around the coastlines. But what I was doing there was mostly science communication with people who wanted to learn about the impacts of climate change on the Greenland ice sheets. So I hadn’t been on a big research expedition to Greenland since 2011. And the changes were absolutely massive.
That was going to be my question!
The Arctic is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. Everything that’s taking place in Greenland is impacting the rest of the world, so I felt that we had a duty and a mission — on top of climbing these incredible monoliths, we actually had to bring something back to society.
In the series, you talk about how remote and understudied East Greenland is by climate scientists. But during the expedition, you were being assisted by support helicopters and by boats. So why aren’t expeditions like this one happening all the time? Is it an issue of funding or a lack of scientific interest in this particular region?
It’s crazy to think of how little data we have from the ground [in East Greenland]. We have satellites — we have as many satellites as we want. But it is very tricky to get there. What you have to understand about this place is that for 10 months of the year, there is sea ice blocking access to this field. Ten months of the year! So the rest of the year — yes, we can access by plane, we can access by boat, but it’s very expensive.
What was great about this project is that we had in mind, “How can we lower our carbon footprint?” This is why, for example, we worked with fishermen who had boats from a nearby village at the entrance of the field. It was very important for us to use local means of transportation. Of course, we had to use helicopters every now and then, because there was no other way. But it’s remote, it’s expensive, and on top of everything, it is extremely hostile.
Oh my gosh, the bashing you get when you go there! This is something that we really wanted to show in the series — how powerful nature can be. And climate change is accelerating and making these changes even more violent. So I think it’s important to show that when nature starts to be a bit destabilized, it can get very angry.
There was a paper in Nature that came out earlier this month that said nearly every glacier in Greenland has thinned or retreated over the past few decades. In the series, there’s a bit of good news, which is that the Daugaard-Jensen Glacier is a little bit more stable than you were anticipating. Do you have any insight into why that might be?
What’s so great is, it keeps part of the mystery! I like that we still don’t totally understand what’s taking place.
The scientists we’ve been working with have told us — this is a bit technical — but it has to do with the shape of the bedrock. It seems that the glacier is resting on a little ridge that might be holding everything together. This might be the reason why the glacier is still stable; also, this part of Greenland still receives a lot of snow.
But we’ve seen some cracks in this perfect picture. You know, the NASA float [that we launched on the expedition] has told us that the temperature of the water in the fjords is increasing. So it’s not all perfect. The environment around it is definitely changing, but it seems that it has some advantages.
Were there any findings from the expedition that you are particularly excited about?
All of them! But science takes a very long time, so at the moment, we’re still waiting on a lot of the results from these different protocols. But what I want to share is something that is very simple: Greenland holds a lot of ice, and if we lose the ice, it means 6 to 7 meters of sea-level rise. As you saw in the paper that was published by Nature, at the moment, Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice per hour. What is crucial to understand is that every action we conduct back home to reduce our carbon footprints and to preserve our climate helps Greenland and helps our collective future. All this data will help us to prepare for the things to come.
Last question: Have you taken up rock climbing?
I’ll be honest: no. I think I’m a bit traumatized in a good way. I think I needed a minute to recover. But I really want to start climbing again — now, with the launch of this series, I know that it’ll be my mission for this year. Otherwise, I think Alex and Hazel will never forgive me.
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On a new report from the Energy Institute, high-stakes legislating, and accelerating nuclear development
Current conditions: Monsoon rains hit the southwestern U.S., with flash floods in Roswell, New Mexico, and flooding in El Paso, Texas • The Forsyth Fire in Utah has spread to 9,000 acres and is only 5% contained • While temperatures are falling into the low 80s in much of the Northeast, a high of 96 degrees Fahrenheit is forecast for Washington, D.C., where Republicans in the Senate seek to finish their work on the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”
The world used more of just about every kind of energy source in 2024, including coal, oil, gas, renewables, hydro, and nuclear, according to the annual Statistical Review of World Energy, released by the Energy Institute. Here are some of the key numbers from the report:
You can read the full report here.
Virginia Republican Jen Kiggans is a vice chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus and a signatory of several letters supporting the preservation of clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, including one letter she co-authored with Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick criticizing the House reconciliation bill’s rough approach to slashing the credits. On Wednesday, however, she said on X that the Senate language “responsibly phases out certain tax credits while preserving American investment and innovation in our energy sector.”
The Senate is still pushing to have the reconciliation bill on President Trump’s desk by July 4, and is expected to work through the weekend to get it done. But as Sahil Kapur of NBC News reported Wednesday, House and Senate leaders have been attempting to hash out yet another version of the bill that could pass both chambers quickly, meaning the legislation is still very much in flux.
Shell is in early talks to acquire fellow multinational oil giant BP, the Wall Street Journal reported. While BP declined to comment to the Journal, Shell called the story “market speculation” and said that “no talks are taking place.”
BP is currently valued at $80 billion, which would make a potential tie-up the largest corporate oil deal since the Exxon Mobil merger, according to the Journal.
Both Shell and BP have walked back from commitments to and investments in decarbonization and green energy in recent months. BP said in September of last year that it would divest from its U.S. wind business, while Shell said in January that it would “pause” its investment in the U.S. offshore wind industry and took an accompanying charge of $1 billion.
The combined company would be better positioned to compete with supermajors like Exxon, which is now worth over $450 billion, while Shell and BP have a combined valuation around $285 billion.
The shuttered Three Mile Island in October. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Three Mile Island Unit 1 will restart a year early, its owner Constellation said Wednesday. When Constellation and Microsoft announced the plan to restart the nuclear facility last fall they gave a target date of 2028. More recently, however, PJM Interconnection, the interstate electricity market that includes Pennsylvania, approved a request made from the state’s governor, Josh Shapiro, to fast-track the plant’s interconnection, the company said, meaning it could open as soon as 2027.
Constellation reported “significant progress” on hiring and training new workers, with around 400 workers either hired or due to start new jobs soon. “We’re on track to make history ahead of schedule, helping America achieve energy independence, supercharge economic growth, and win the global AI race,” Constellation’s chief executive Joe Dominguez said.
The Chinese electric carmarker BYD is addressing rising inventory and lower prices by cutting back its production plans. The company “has slowed its production and expansion pace in recent months by reducing shifts at some factories in China and delaying plans to add new production lines,” Reuters reported.
The slowdown comes “as it grapples with rising inventory even after offering deep price cuts in China's cutthroat auto market,” according to the Reuters report.
In 2024, BYD beat out Tesla in annual sales, with over 4 million cars sold, for a total annual revenue over $100 billion. Tesla’s revenue was just short of $100 billion last year.
While BYD’s factories may be slowing down, it is still looking to expand, especially overseas. In April, more than 7,000 BYD battery electric cars were registered in Europe, according to Bloomberg. This more-than-doubling since last year slingshotted BYD past Tesla on the continent, where its sales have fallen by almost 50%.
“Where does the power sector go from here?” an audience member asked at our exclusive Heatmap subscriber event in New York on Wednesday, referring to a potential future without the Inflation Reduction Act. “Higher costs,” Emily Pontecorvo answered. There is one potential bright spot, however, as Robinson Meyer explained: “If I were a Democrat considering running an affordability campaign or a cost-of-living campaign in ’26 or ’28, there’s lots of openings to talk about clean energy — the policy that’s happening right now — utility rates, and energy affordability.”
The science is still out — but some of the industry’s key players are moving ahead regardless.
The ocean is by far the world’s largest carbon sink, capturing about 30% of human-caused CO2 emissions and about 90% of the excess heat energy from said emissions. For about as long as scientists have known these numbers, there’s been intrigue around engineering the ocean to absorb even more. And more recently, a few startups have gotten closer to making this a reality.
Last week, one of them got a vote of confidence from leading carbon removal registry Isometric, which for the first time validated “ocean alkalinity enhancement” credits sold by the startup Planetary — 625.6 to be exact, representing 625.6 metric tons of carbon removed. No other registry has issued credits for this type of carbon removal.
When the ocean absorbs carbon, the CO2 in the air reacts with the water to form carbonic acid, which quickly breaks down into hydrogen ions and bicarbonate. The excess hydrogen increases the acidity of the ocean, changing its chemistry to make it less effective at absorbing CO2, like a sponge that’s already damp. As levels of atmospheric CO2 increase, the ocean is getting more acidic overall, threatening marine ecosystems.
Planetary is working to make the ocean less acidic, so that it can take in more carbon. At its pilot plant in Nova Scotia, the company adds alkalizing magnesium hydroxide to wastewater after it’s been used to cool a coastal power plant and before it’s discharged back into the ocean. When the alkaline substance (which, if you remember your high school chemistry, is also known as a base) dissolves in the water, it releases hydroxide ions, which combine with and neutralize hydrogen ions. This in turn reduces local acidity and raises the ocean’s pH, thus increasing its capacity to absorb more carbon dioxide. That CO2 is then stored as a stable bicarbonate for thousands of years.
“The ocean has just got such a vast amount of capacity to store carbon within it,” Will Burt, Planetary’s vice president of science and product, told me. Because ocean alkalinity enhancement mimics a natural process, there are fewer ecosystem concerns than with some other means of ocean-based carbon removal, such as stimulating algae blooms. And unlike biomass or soil-related carbon removal methods, it has a very minimal land footprint. For this reason, Burt told me “the massiveness of the ocean is going to be the key to climate relevance” for the carbon dioxide removal industry as a whole.
But that’s no guarantee. As with any open system where carbon can flow in and out, how much carbon the ocean actually absorbs is tricky to measure and verify. The best oceanography models we have still don’t always align with observational data.
Given this, is it too soon for Planetary to issue credits? It’s just not possible right now for the startup — or anyone in the field — to quantify the exact amount of carbon that this process is removing. And while the company incorporates error bars into its calculations and crediting mechanisms, scientists simply aren’t certain about the degree of uncertainty that remains.
“I think we still have a lot of work to do to actually characterize the uncertainty bars and make ourselves confident that there aren’t unknown unknowns that we are not thinking about,” Freya Chay, a program lead at CarbonPlan, told me. The nonprofit aims to analyze the efficacy of various carbon removal pathways, and has worked with Planetary to evaluate and inform its approach to ocean alkalinity enhancement.
Planetary’s process for measurement and verification employs a combination of near field observational data and extensive ocean modeling to estimate the rate, efficiency, and permanence of carbon uptake. Close to the point where it releases the magnesium hydroxide, the company uses autonomous sensors at and below the ocean’s surface to measure pH and other variables. This real-time data then feeds into ocean models intended to simulate large-scale processes such as how alkalinity disperses and dissolves, the dynamics of CO2 absorption, and ultimately how much carbon is locked away for the long-term.
But though Planetary’s models are peer-reviewed and best in class, they have their limits. One of the largest remaining unknowns is how natural changes in ocean alkalinity feed into the whole equation — that is, it’s possible that artificially alkalizing the ocean could prevent the uptake of naturally occurring bases. If this is happening at scale, it would call into question the “enhancement” part of alkalinity enhancement.
There’s also the issue of regional and seasonal variability in the efficiency of CO2 uptake, which makes it difficult to put any hard numbers to the efficacy of this solution overall. To this end, CarbonPlan has worked with the marine carbon removal research organization [C]Worthy to develop an interactive tool that allows companies to explore how alkalinity moves through the ocean and removes carbon in various regions over time.
As Chay explained, though, not all the models agree on just how much carbon is removed by a given base in a given location at a given time. “You can characterize how different the models are from each other, but then you also have to figure out which ones best represent the real world,” she told me. “And I think we have a lot of work to do on that front.”
From Chay’s perspective, whether or not Planetary is “ready” to start selling carbon removal credits largely depends on the claims that its buyers are trying to make. One way to think about it, she told me, is to imagine how these credits would stand up in a hypothetical compliance carbon market, in which a polluter could buy a certain amount of ocean alkalinity credits that would then allow them to release an equivalent amount of emissions under a legally mandated cap.
“When I think about that, I have a very clear instinctual reaction, which is, No, we are far from ready,”Chay told me.
Of course, we don’t live in a world with a compliance carbon market, and most of Planetary’s customers thus far — Stripe, Shopify, and the larger carbon removal coalition, Frontier, that they’re members of — have refrained from making concrete claims about how their voluntary carbon removal purchases impact broader emissions goals. But another customer, British Airways, does appear to tout its purchases from Planetary and others as one of many pathways it’s pursuing to reach net zero. Much like the carbon market itself, such claims are not formally regulated.
All of this, Chay told me, makes trying to discern the most responsible way to support nascent solutions all the more “squishy.”
Matt Long, CEO and co-founder of [C]Worthy, told me that he thinks it’s both appropriate and important to start issuing credits for ocean alkalinity enhancement — while also acknowledging that “we have robust reason to believe that we can do a lot better” when it comes to assessing these removals.
For the time being, he calls Planetary’s approach to measurement “largely credible.”
“What we need to adopt is a permissive stance towards uncertainty in the early days, such that the industry can get off the ground and we can leverage commercial pilot deployments, like the one that Planetary has engaged in, as opportunities to advance the science and practice of removal quantification,” Long told me.
Indeed, for these early-stage removal technologies there are virtually no other viable paths to market beyond selling credits on the voluntary market. This, of course, is the very raison d’etre of the Frontier coalition, which was formed to help emerging CO2 removal technologies by pre-purchasing significant quantities of carbon removal. Today’s investors are banking on the hope that one day, the federal government will establish a domestic compliance market that allows companies to offset emissions by purchasing removal credits. But until then, there’s not really a pool of buyers willing to fund no-strings-attached CO2 removal.
Isometric — an early-stage startup itself — says its goal is to restore trust in the voluntary carbon market, which has a history of issuing bogus offset credits. By contrast, Isometric only issues “carbon removal” credits, which — unlike offsets — are intended to represent a permanent drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere, which the company defines as 1,000 years or longer. Isometric’s credits also must align with the registry’s peer-reviewed carbon removal protocols, though these are often written in collaboration with startups such as Planetary that are looking to get their methodologies approved.
The initial carbon removal methods that Isometric dove into — bio-oil geological storage, biomass geological storage, direct air capture — are very measurable. But Isometric has since branched beyond the easy wins to develop protocols for potentially less permanent and more difficult to quantify carbon removal methods, including enhanced weathering, biochar production, and reforestation.
Thus, the core tension remains. Because while Isometric’s website boasts that corporations can “be confident every credit is a guaranteed tonne of carbon removal,” the way researchers like Chay and Long talk about Planetary makes it sound much more like a promising science project that’s being refined and iterated upon in the public sphere.
For his part, Burt told me he knows that Planetary’s current methodologies have room for improvement, and that being transparent about that is what will ultimately move the company forward. “I am constantly talking to oceanography forums about, Here’s how we’re doing it. We know it’s not perfect. How do we improve it?” he said.
While Planetary wouldn’t reveal its current price per ton of CO2 removed, the company told me in an emailed statement that it expects its approach “to ultimately be the lowest-cost form” of carbon removal. Burt said that today, the majority of a credit’s cost — and its embedded emissions — comes from transporting bases from the company’s current source in Spain to its pilot project in Nova Scotia. In the future, the startup plans to mitigate this by co-locating its projects and alkalinity sources, and by clustering project sites in the same area.
“You could probably have another one of these sites 2 kilometers down the coast,” he told me, referring to the Nova Scotia project. “You could do another 100,000 tonnes there, and that would not be too much for the system, because the ocean is very quickly diluted.”
The company has a long way to go before reaching that type of scale though. From the latter half of last year until now, Planetary has released about 1,100 metric tons of material into the ocean, which it says will lead to about 1,000 metric tons of carbon removal.
But as I was reminded by everyone, we’re still in the first inning of the ocean alkalinity enhancement era. For its part, [C]Worthy is now working to create the data and modeling infrastructure that startups such as Planetary will one day use to more precisely quantify their carbon removal benefits.
“We do not have the system in place that we will have. But as a community, we have to recognize the requirement for carbon removal is very large, and that the implication is that we need to be building this industry now,” Long told me.
In other words: Ready or not, here we come.
On mercury rising, climate finance, and aviation emissions
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Andrea has become the first named Atlantic storm of 2025 • Hundreds of thousands are fleeing their homes in southwest China as heavy rains cause rivers to overflow • It’s hot and humid in New York’s Long Island City neighborhood, where last night New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani delivered his victory speech after defeating former governor and longtime party power broker Andrew Cuomo in the race’s Democratic primary.
The brutal heat dome baking the eastern half of the United States continues today. Cooler weather is in the forecast for tomorrow, but this heat wave has broken a slew of temperature records across multiple states this week:
In Washington, D.C., rail temperatures reached a blistering 135 degrees, forcing the city’s Metro to slow down train service. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the heat sickened more than 150 people attending a high school graduation ceremony. As power demand surged, the Department of Energy issued an energy emergency in the Southeast to “help mitigate the risk of blackouts.”
As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin pointed out on Tuesday, in terms of what is on the grid and what is demanded of it, this may be the easiest summer for a long time. “Demands on the grid are growing at the same time the resources powering it are changing,” Zeitlin writes. “Electricity load growth is forecast to grow several percent a year through at least the end of the decade. At the same time, aging plants reliant on oil, gas, and coal are being retired (although planned retirements are slowing down), while new resources, largely solar and batteries, are often stuck in long interconnection queues — and, when they do come online, offer unique challenges to grid operators when demand is high.”
A group of 21 Democrat-led states including New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, and California, is suing the Trump administration for cutting billions of dollars in federal funding, including grants related to climate change initiatives. The lawsuit says federal agencies have been “unlawfully invoking a single subclause” to cancel grants that the administration deems no longer align with its priorities. The clause in question states that federal agencies can terminate grants “pursuant to the terms and conditions of the federal award, including, to the extent authorized by law, if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” The states accuse the administration of leaning on this clause for “virtually unfettered authority to withhold federal funding any time they no longer wish to support the programs for which Congress has appropriated funding.”
The rollback has gutted projects across states and nonprofits that support diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as climate change preparation programs and research. The states say the clause is being used unlawfully, and hope a judge agrees. “These cuts are simply illegal,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James. “Congress has the power of the purse, and the president cannot cut billions of dollars of essential resources simply because he doesn’t like the programs being funded.”
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A brief update from the Bonn Climate Change Conference in Germany: A group of 44 “Least Developed Countries” have called for rich countries to triple the financing goal for climate change adaptation by 2030 compared to 2022 levels. The current target sits at $40 billion a year by 2025, a number set back in 2021 at COP26. According toClimate Home News, tripling the financing goal on 2022 levels would bring in a little less than $100 billion annually. That’s far short of the $160 billion to $340 billion that the United Nations estimates will be needed by 2030. The Indian Express also reports that developing countries have “managed to force a reopening of discussions on the obligations of developed nations to ‘provide’ finance, and not just make efforts towards ‘mobilising’ financial resources, for climate action.” The issue will also be discussed at COP30 in Brazil later this year. The Bonn conference has been running since June 16 and ends tomorrow.
In the UK, aviation is now a bigger source of greenhouse gas emissions than the power sector, according to a new report from the Climate Change Committee. The independent climate advisors say that demand for leisure travel is boosting demand for international flights, and “continued emissions growth in this sector could put future targets at risk.” Meanwhile, the UK power sector has been rapidly decarbonizing, and is now the sixth largest source of emissions. (In the U.S., electricity production is the second-largest source of emissions, behind transportation.) The report also found that heat pump installations increased by 56% in 2024, and that nearly 20% of new vehicles sold were electric. UK emissions were down 50% last year compared to 1990.
The committee applauded the progress but urged more action from the government to cut electricity prices to help speed up the transition to clean technologies. “Our country is among a leading group of economies demonstrating a commitment to decarbonise society,” said Piers Forster, interim chair of the committee. “This is to be celebrated: delivering deep emissions reduction is the only way to slow global warming.”
Voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds. The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.) The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
As a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran takes hold, oil prices are now lower than they were before the conflict began on June 13.