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This year set a high bar for climate writing, from fiction like Eleanor Catton’s terrific Birnam Woods andLydia Kiesling’s sharp and prescientMobility to nonfiction like John Vaillant’s best-of-list-topping Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell’s timelyThe Heat Will Kill You First. Needless to say, next year has its work cut out for it.
But after spending the past several weeks digging through publisher catalogs and publicist emails (so … many … emails), I feel confident that the coming year of climate writing will be able to hold its own. Here are 17 books I immediately added to my to-be-read pile for 2024. (We’ve made it easy to add them to yours, too. Just check out our curated list on Bookshop here.)
Author Christy Lefteri first encountered wildfire in 2017, when she was working in Greece as a volunteer at a refugee shelter for women and children displaced by the Syrian Civil War. “I woke up one morning and the sky was filled with smoke,” she recalled to Publishers Weekly. “There was a fire in a nearby town. It haunted me.” The Book of Fire — which follows up Lefteri’s 2019 bestseller The Beekeeper of Aleppo — centers on a Greek family whose lives are forever altered when a forest fire destroys their home and village. The Guardiancalled it a “poignant, intimate family” story. Preorder it here.
Hannah Ritchie is the deputy editor of Our World in Data, one of my favorite resources for climate information, and her debut book has been described as a “surprisingly optimistic and often counterintuitive story, one that completely contradicts the doomsday-ism in most climate change conversations” by none other than — wait for it — Bill Gates. While many climate handbooks do a lot of handwringing, Ritchie aims to give readers actionable and data-backed ways to address urgent environmental problems. Not the End of the World has already earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and counts Margaret Atwood among its growing fans. Preorder it here.
If you want to get a jump on the book everyone will be talking about this winter, you should preorder Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto now. Already an international bestseller — the English translation arrives in January — Slow Down makes a Marxist argument that growth-focused solutions to inequality and climate change like the Green New Deal are a “dangerous compromise.” Instead, Saito argues for decarbonization through shorter working hours and an end to mass consumption. The book has received starred reviews from the major trade publications and excited intellectuals including philosopher Slavoj Žižek, critic and editor Malcolm Harris, and Fire Weather author John Vaillant, among others. You’ll want to have an opinion on this one. Preorder it here.
What do we owe the places we love? In 2017, Manjula Martin and her partner moved from San Francisco to a peaceful refuge in the forest of California’s Sonoma County. On the night of their housewarming party, however, a fire tore through the region; Martin’s new home survived, but it would only become under greater threat in 2020, one of the state’s worst fire seasons in recorded history. “Humans have evolved with fire,” Martin explained to my colleague Neel Dhanesha earlier this year, “and the more I engage with fire, the more I learn about it, the more I understand its role in both the land and the history of this place, the less afraid I feel.” Kirkuspraised her memoir as “insightful and alarming, hopeful, and consistently engaging.” Preorder it here.
I’ve been hearing great things about Ray Nayler since the release of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, in 2022, and if I’m not careful, I will soon be playing catch-up: His sophomore book will be out in just a few weeks. In this novella, Russian scientists have managed to bring woolly mammoths back from extinction, but the creatures need to learn how to survive in the modern day. Enter elephant behavior expert Damira Khismatullina — who was murdered trying to protect the world’s last herds from ivory poachers. Luckily, Damira’s consciousness was uploaded to the cloudbefore she was killed, and the scientists are able to implant it in the woolly mammoths’ matriarch. Library Journal named this book its sci-fi pick of the month and “highly” recommends it for “readers of eco-terrorism thrillers and climate fiction.” And the premise might not be as far-fetched as it sounds: At COP28 this year, a Russian billionaire hawked a plan to bring back woolly mammoths to Siberia. Preorder it here.
“Near-future thrillers don’t come much better than this stellar effort,” according to Publishers Weekly. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, Ben’s fiancee Cara takes a job working for a billionaire on a private island called Sanctuary Rock — then writes Ben to say she isn’t coming back. Ben, worried, decides to track down Cara by joining the community while poking around for clues into what he’s sure must be a dark plot. This climate thriller is already out in the U.K. and I keep hearing about its “effective shocker of an ending” — pick up this one before someone spoils it for you. Preorder it here.
Aboriginal-Australian author Alexis Wright’s newest novel is aptly named: Praiseworthy has received tons of acclaim abroad, with The Guardian marveling, “How can one novel contain so much?” The book centers on a small town in north Australia threatened by a strange haze — though a precise description of the plot is difficult to come by. “The Ancestors of contemporary Aboriginal people are key to a story that also addresses issues of sovereignty, colonial violence, and the devastation caused by global climate change,” reads one attempt. “In addition, Praiseworthy is a tale of migrations and family connections elsewhere. And it is a story about donkeys.” But as “freewheeling” as its plot might be, the raves for Praiseworthy are impossible to ignore. It’s a “heartbreaking masterpiece,” said Publishers Weekly, adding: “This is unforgettable.” Preorder it here.
Former HuffPost climate reporter Sarah Ruiz-Grossman makes her debut with A Fire So Wild, which its publisher describes as Little Fires Everywhere meets Disappearing Earth. On Abigail’s 50th birthday, she decides to throw a party to raise funds for a new affordable housing project in Berkeley. But while the haves mingle with the have-nots — Willow, whom Abigail met at a soup kitchen, is working as a server at the party — a wildfire burns closer and closer to the gala. This novel sounds juicy — and ripe for Hollywood. Enjoy the bragging rights of saying you read the book first. Preorder it here.
Birding to Change the World shares its name with a course that its author, Trish O’Kane, teaches at the University of Vermont, pairing college students with elementary school children and having them go birdwatching together. But O’Kane wasn’t always a birder; it wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina struck her home in New Orleans that she “took a cup of coffee and sat on the back stoop. About a dozen small brown sparrows clung to a few spindly trees. Where did they go during the hurricane? How did they survive?” In a starred review, Publishers Weeklypraised the memoir for knitting together personal and natural history to share how O’Kane’s interest in birds grew to the point that she “quit her journalism career, [returned] to school at age 45 ... and [became] an ardent conservationist.” Preorder it here.
“My grandmother Mabel Raboteau fled the coastal town of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and the terror of Jim Crow along the northern pathway of the Great Migration, to Michigan, to save her life and the lives of her children.” So begins a 2019 essay by Emily Raboteau in The New York Review of Books titled “Lessons In Survival,” which goes on to review two other books. Now, though, it is Raboteau’s turn to tell her story. Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” is “a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises,” per its publisher, and touches on themes of Black womanhood, art and history, and, of course, what it means to be a mother in an uncertain world. Preorder it here.
I can lose myself for hours looking at photographs by Virginia Hanusik, whose work explores how climate change is reshaping the Mississippi River delta. Into the Quiet and the Light is an apt title for her debut collection; her photos are often subdued, unpopulated, and symmetrical, a combination that gives them the quality of being both painterly and lonely. The collection will include texts from a number of writers, including architects, historians, activists, and organizers. Get a feel for Hanusik’s work with her 2022 photo essay for Bitter Southernerhere before smashing that preorder link. Preorder it here.
A little over a year ago, Elizabeth Kolbert published a lengthy essay in The New Yorker under the title “Climate Change From A to Z.” It delivered on its premise: In 26 short essays ranging from “Arrhenius” to “Zero,” Kolbert tackled the uncertainty — and breadth — of the climate crisis. H Is for Hope expands on the original concept and, thankfully, doesn’t drop the lovely accompanying illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook. A must-have for your climate shelf. Preorder it here.
The planet is changing; more and more places around the globe are becoming uninhabitable. The United States is not immune: By journalist Abrahm Lustgarten’s estimate, by 2070, “at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life.” Where will we be forced to leave? And if we leave, where will we go? Lustgarten seeks answers in his forthcoming data-driven book, On the Move, which explores what a mass migration might look like in the U.S. as fires in the West, floods on the coasts, and extreme heat and drought in the South drive populations inland. You might want to read this one before buying a house. Preorder it here.
I love history, science, and animals, so I feel pretty confident I’ll love Every Living Thing, which tells the story of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon’s dueling attempts to identify all life on Earth. I mean, pffft, how hard could it be? Author Jason Roberts reportedly spent more than a decade researching this book, which follows up his 2006 biography of James Holman, A Sense of the World, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Preorder it here.
It might seem like everyone is into birding these days — and you can count The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan among them. She hasn't always been curious about her avian neighbors, however. That changed in 2016, when Tan was desperate for a distraction from the world. Soon, she was sketching the birds; next, she signing up to have 10,000 mealworms delivered each week for her new friends. “I have identified 56 species in my yard,” Tan told the Sierra Club, admitting “I went a little overboard” on the whole birding thing. But it’s because she went overboard that we get to enjoy The Backyard Bird Chronicles, which gathers Tan’s journal entries and original sketches. Preorder it here.
A longtime editor for the Times Literary Supplement, Roz Dineen is set to publish her debut novel, a dystopian tale of a mother raising three children while her husband is overseas. As things worsen in the city, Cass decides to take the children to her mother-in-law’s house in the country — and when that no longer seems safe, either, to a commune on the coast. The book description brings to mind Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, with the publisher writing that “against a wider backdrop of a world imploding, [Briefly Very Beautiful] is an exploration of hope and fear, beauty and joy, as well as seismic betrayal.” Preorder it here.
Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam provide power for 5.8 million homes and businesses across seven states. But since 2000, the lake has been drying up. At a certain point, if the level falls too low, it will reach “dead pool,” a state when there is only a weak amount of water flowing through the dam — what Bob Martin, the deputy power manager at Glen Canyon, has called “a complete doomsday scenario” to The Washington Post. At the same time, activists are increasingly pushing to drain Lake Powell and restore the Colorado River. Journalist and passionate river rafter Zak Podmore explores the issue further in his forthcoming book, Life After Dead Pool, which is “not a dour story of climate disaster” but rather “an original account of Glen Canyon’s resurrection,” according to its publisher. Preorder it here.
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On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.
On the Senate Finance Committee’s budget proposal, the NRC, and fossil-fuel financing
Current conditions: A brush fire that prompted evacuations in Maui on Sunday and Monday is now 93% contained • The Des Moines metro area issued its first-ever ban on watering lawns due to record nitrate concentrations in nearby rivers • For only the fourth time since 1937, Vancouver, British Columbia got no rain at all in the first half of June. The dry streak may finally break tonight.
The Senate Finance Committee published its portion of the budget reconciliation bill on Monday night, including details of its highly anticipated plan to revise the nation’s clean energy tax credits. Though the Senate version slightly softens the House’s proposed phase out of tax credits, “the text would still slash many of the signature programs of the Inflation Reduction Act,” my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Robinson Meyer write in their breakdown of the bill. Other changes to be aware of include:
There’s more, too, which you can read here.
President Trump fired Chris Hanson, a Democrat and his first-term appointee to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Friday. Trump “terminated my position … without cause, contrary to existing law and longstanding precedent regarding removal of independent agency appointees,” Hanson said in his announcement, published Monday. Since the creation of the NRC, which regulates nuclear power, no commissioner has ever been fired from the body.
After being appointed by Trump in 2020, Hanson was promoted to chair the commission by President Biden in 2021. His term ended in January, after which he returned to serving on the board, Notus reports. Trump’s decision to fire Hanson comes on the heels of his recent flurry of executive orders aimed at quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity, including a measure seeking to “simplify and accelerate the NRC’s licensing procedure, giving the body 18 months to issue new rules and guidance designed to shorten the timeline for processing new applications to 18 months at the longest,” as my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Katie Brigham explained last month. News of Hanson’s firing was met with “serious dismay” by attendees of the American Nuclear Society conference underway in Chicago, per Katy Huff, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a statement, ANS argued that a “competent, effective, and fully staffed [NRC] is essential to the rapid deployment of new reactors and advanced technologies.”
Banks increased fossil fuel financing by more than one-fifth in 2024, marking the first time that fossil fuel financing has failed to decline since 2021, a new report by the Rainforest Action Network and other environmental groups found. Among the world’s top 65 largest banks, coal, oil, and gas assets rose by $162 billion, to $869 billion, with JPMorgan Chase seeing the biggest increase of more than a third to $53.5 billion, followed by Citigroup, Bank of America, and Barclays. In a statement to the Financial Times, JPMorgan said it believed its own data “reflects our activities more comprehensively,” and said it provided $1.29 in clean-energy financing for every dollar financing fossil fuels. However, as the report argues, “Banks are abandoning their previously announced emissions reduction targets in favor of temperature trajectories that allow for more fossil fuel finance. Though they may also increase financing of renewable energy, banks’ continued fossil fuel finance entrenches climate chaos and undercuts clean energy development.” Read the full findings here.
Drivers in Europe are becoming more unwilling to consider switching to an electric vehicle, outpacing even the growing reluctance seen in the United States, according to a new survey published by Shell on Tuesday. In Europe, 41% of respondents said they’d consider switching to an EV, down from 48% last year, while in the U.S., the number fell only 3 percentage points, to 31%. “Europe surprised us,” David Bunch, Shell’s chief for mobility and convenience, said, per Reuters. “The single biggest barrier to entry is the cost of the vehicle.”
While Shell — the world’s second-biggest fossil fuel company by revenue and profit — might seem an unlikely source for an electric vehicle survey, the company also has the most extensive EV charging network in the UK. Its findings weren’t all negative, either: in China, interest in buying an electric vehicle was as high as 89%. Additionally, Shell found that nine in 10 EV drivers would consider purchasing an electric vehicle again, and 60% said they worry less about running out of charge than they did a year ago, Bloomberg reports. Separately, International Energy Agency data shows that electric vehicle adoption continues at a healthy pace worldwide, exceeding 17 million sales globally in 2024, or a share of more than 20%.
Global electric car sales, 2014-2024
IEA
The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced its commitment of £7.9 billion, or more than $10 billion, to the nation’s most extensive flood defense infrastructure program in its history. The program will not only include traditional construction, such as flood barriers, but also nature-based solutions like reforestation and wetland restoration, according to Business Green. In its announcement, the government said that for every £1 invested, it expected to prevent £8 in economic damage. “Protecting citizens is the first duty of any government,” Environment Secretary Steve Reed said in a statement, adding, “As our changing climate continues to bring more extreme weather to the nation, it's never been more vital to invest in new flood defences and repair our existing assets.” Separately, the U.K. Treasury also announced Tuesday a plan to spend £1 billion, or about $1.3 billion, on “funding to repair bridges, tunnels, and flyovers that are facing increased impacts from extreme weather and heavier vehicles,” Business Green adds.
Republicans in Los Angeles who don’t have air conditioning are “more likely to consider climate change a human-caused threat and more likely to support individual and government action to address climate change” than Republicans who have central air, a recent study published by the American Meteorological Society found. There was no similar divide among Democrats.