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Climate change once dominated the Oscars. Not so much this year.
Talking about climate change: out.
Hollywood loves a good trend, but while rose appliqués and feel-good comeback stories made the cut for the 2023 Oscars, the most important story of our time was hard to spot. During Sunday night’s three-hour-and-thirty-seven-minute-long telecast, there was virtually no mention of climate change.
That marks a notable departure from years past. Going back to 2007, when An Inconvenient Truth became the first documentary to win two Oscars, celebrities like Al Gore, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Joaquin Phoenix have used their acceptance speeches to urge attention and action for the cause. There has also been an uptick in climate-related nominees, from Beasts of the Southern Wild (2013) to water scarcity apocalypse films like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Dune (2021). In 2020, the red carpet was all about sustainable fashion. Last year, after inspiring a Just Stop Oil protest at the BAFTAs earlier in awards season, Don't Look Now made the Oscars' opening monologue with host Amy Schumer joking its star, Dicaprio, is fighting climate change so he can “leave behind a cleaner planet for his girlfriends.”
But while climate may have vanished into the backdrop like a white dress into a champagne carpet on Sunday, it wasn’t actually gone. A number of this year's nominees grappled either directly or indirectly with related themes, including Best Picture competitor Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron’s upwards-of-two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar environmental exploitation metaphor; All that Breathes, a heartbreaking documentary about a Delhi bird hospital that lost so the Academy could poke Russia in the eye with Navalny; EO, a Polish foreign-language nominee that follows the trials of a donkey, and which turned half the crew working on it into vegetarians during production; and Haulout, a short doc about how rising temperatures are decimating the Siberian walrus population. The Elephant Whisperers, which examines how climate change and humans are destroying Asian elephant habitats, ultimately took the statuette in the short documentary competition and was the only climate-related winner of the night.
Researchers and storytelling consultants have pushed in recent years for there to be more projects focused on climate change, especially in fiction. As one study found, of the thousands of new scripted shows and movies made between 2016 and 2020, “only 2.8 percent included any climate-related keyword.” There is an obvious disjointedness there: If you’re “telling a story that takes place on this Earth in modern times or in the future that doesn’t acknowledge climate change, it’s going to feel divorced from the audience’s lives,” Anna Jane Joyner, the founder of Good Energy, a firm that pushes for better climate stories in Hollywood, told Time earlier this month. “You know, kind of like showing flip phones instead of iPhones.”
But just because you can tell a story about the climate doesn’t necessarily mean you should, as Apple TV+’s dreadful Extrapolations, out later this week, proves. Though storytelling will undoubtedly have a central role in how we speak, understand, and act on climate in the coming years, climate change is still a new, gangly, awkward, and developing genre — and one that too often beats you over the head with obvious metaphors or vague gestures of urgency. Avatar: The Way of Water, for example, was a visually stunning project, but it was hardly the best film of 2022, hamstrung by a shallow metaphor that veers into tropism. More promise might be found in a film like First Reformed, which struggles to reconcile faith with our destruction of the world, and which got a nod from the Academy for Screenwriting in 2019. We're still finding our way forward, with hits and misses; as the years go on, our stories will get better.
Still, it’s perhaps surprising celebrities were so tight-lipped on Sunday night. There were no social-media-friendly mentions of #StopWillow during the evening, for example, nor acknowledgments of California’s recent extreme (albeit, not always directly climate-change-related) weather. Even actress Zoe Saldaña — the ambassador for RCGD Global, which partnered with the Academy this year to distribute a responsible fashion style guide — didn’t get into the reasons why we need to focus on “sustainability” when she talked about her vintage Fendi dress.
The cynical view would be that the silence on Sunday represents passive complacency. With the growing scrutiny of individual celebrities, and social media quick to call out perceived hypocrites, no one wants to risk throwing themselves into the crosshairs by claiming to be a model climate citizen. And to be fair, Oscar viewers might not want to hear about personal responsibility from those winding about L.A. in their limousines.
More optimistically, though, it might be that climate-related storytelling just had an off year. If Avatar, All that Breathes, or EO had won, perhaps their creators would have highlighted the urgency of climate change from the stage. Next year there will also be ample opportunities, with DiCaprio back on the red carpet for Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon, about the murders of Osage Native Americans on their oil-producing lands in Oklahoma; Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, a Manhattan Project biographical film with obvious preoccupations about the end of the world; and, of course, Dune: Part Two.
As Hollywood always shows, trends come and trends go. The climate wasn’t the cause du jour of this particular Oscars. But like Juliet cardigans, low-rise jeans, and other inescapable abominations, it isn’t going anywhere.
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On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.