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How do you promote ‘beating the heat’ in a city that desperately wants them to win?
Miami has two heat seasons and this year, against all odds, they happen to overlap.
The No. 8-seed Miami Heat have played deep into June against the Denver Nuggets in the NBA Finals after having notched an improbable series win against the No. 2-seed Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals and hung on for an all-important road win in the best-of-seven championship series that started in the Mile High City last week. Though Miamians are no strangers to winning, the 2023 team’s endearing underdog narrative has ignited Heat fever across the county, and country, with many former Floridians making the pilgrimage home just to root for their team.
Quietly, though, a group of public officials in Miami-Dade County is doing everything in their power to ensure that the heat doesn’t win.
A former high school basketball player herself, Jane Gilbert is aware that rooting against the heat in Miami is practically sacrilege. But in a sense, it’s her full-time job: Gilbert is the city’s Chief Heat Officer. The first-of-its-kind position was established to strategize and mobilize against Miami’s extreme heat; for her, the heat season runs “the opposite of our basketball season,” from May 1 to October 31 each year.
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Though the position of a Chief Heat Officer has now been replicated by Phoenix, L.A., and a number of international cities including Monterrey, Mexico; Athens, Greece; and Dhaka, Bangladesh, Miami-Dade County was “the first community in the world to establish an official Heat Season” and Heat Officer post, Daniella Levine Cava, the Miami-Dade County mayor (not to be confused with the mayor of the city of Miami or the mayor of Miami Beach), told Heatmap. “This initiative is critical to help us prepare and protect people, particularly the most vulnerable, from the threat of this ‘silent killer.’”
Extreme heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States, although it’s not the highest profile, especially in a besieged state like Florida. For most Americans on the outside looking in, climate change in the Sunshine State manifests as rising sea levels, hurricanes, and Governor Ron DeSantis’ increasing denialism. That’s not necessarily how it’s experienced first-hand, though; in fact, when low-income communities in Miami-Dade were asked their top concern related to climate change, it wasn’t sea level rise or even hurricanes that they pointed to: It was the heat.
Heat is different in Florida than in the Western United States “where you get the extremes, those heat waves,” Gilbert explained to me. “Here we have chronic high heat.” While the danger for populations in places like the Northwest is a lack of preparedness for extreme heat events, “what we worry about [in Miami] is A/C-insecure and energy insecure populations where they can’t afford the utility bills anymore because of the combination of all costs.” Then there’s Gilbert’s nightmare scenario: a “widespread power outage during a hot time like we had with Hurricane Irma in 2017,” when 12 nursing home residents died from heat exposure.
Chronic extreme heat will be a fact of Miami-Dade’s future. The county already has 50 more days with a heat index over 90 than it did half a century ago — “I’ve been here 27 years, and I feel the difference,” Gilbert told me. Studies have found that Miami-Dade will “likely suffer the most extreme change” in temperature of any region in the U.S.
Gilbert, who was appointed to her office as part of Miami’s overarching Resilience Center program in 2021, sees much of her job as reaching the right people in a voice that they’ll be receptive to. That’s both literal — PSAs are distributed in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole — but also involves the more delicate art of building authority and trust. Reaching an “elderly single woman,” for example, “is different than a construction worker; that’s different than a pregnant mom with young kids.”
Adding to this trickiness, of course, is how to get the word out about the Miami heat without getting it confused with, you know, the other Miami Heat. When researching this piece, I found that even a specified Google search of “extreme heat Miami” turned up superlative results about the basketball team. “It’s both a blessing and a little bit of a challenge because certainly I don’t want [the message to be] ‘Beat the Heat,’ right?” Gilbert, who’s a fan of the team, said. Luckily, the Heat basketball team seems amused by the connection too: “They sent me my own personalized jersey when I was appointed,” Gilbert added, “which was very nice.”
It’s unclear at this point how far the Heat will make it in the finals; if they lose on Friday night, they’ll be down 1-3 in the series, putting them on the cusp of what would be a heartbreaking, if anticipated, defeat. But for Gilbert and her team, the days ahead are all about pace, discipline, and hustle. There’s a long season ahead and it’s just getting started.
Read more about the wildfire smoke engulfing the eastern United States:
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Wildfire Smoke Is a Wheezy Throwback for New York City
Wednesday Was the Worst Day for Wildfire Pollution in U.S. History
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Direct air capture isn’t doing everything its advocates promised — yet. That doesn’t make it a scam.
Two events last week thrust direct air capture carbon removal into the spotlight — one promising, though controversial for some, the other mendacious and ill-informed.
On Friday, Occidental announced a potential $500 million joint venture investment from Adnoc’s XRG, the lower-carbon investment wing for the United Arab Emirates state-run oil company in Oxy’s South Texas DAC Hub project. The facility is part of the $3.5 billion federal DAC hubs program created through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Although the DAC hubs program has strong bipartisan support, it has faced relative uncertainty under the new administration, calling into question American leadership on the future of the industry.
Earlier in the week, Climeworks, another major DAC hubs award winner, announced a reduction in force, due in part to “pending clarity for our next plant in the U.S.” Coupled with this news, a sensationalized exposé by Icelandic news outlet Heimildin detailed challenges with the first two Climeworks facilities, including commentary that called both the company and the technology a “scam” and the “Theranos of the energy industry.”
DAC has never been entirely welcome among climate advocates. To a certain extent, its critics are right: The process of pulling carbon directly out of the ambient air and storing it permanently underground is both energy- and capital-intensive, and it has obvious utility for the oil and gas industry, which has seized on DAC’s potential to erase past emissions as a way to argue that the transition away from fossil energy isn’t actually necessary.
But these critics start to lose the thread when they call the technology a “fig leaf” for oil and gas or an “expensive, dangerous distraction,” and most egregiously when they point to the lack of actual carbon dioxide removed using the technology as an argument against future deployments.
There is a scientific consensus behind the need for carbon dioxide removal that these critiques dance around. As the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lays out in its most recent scientific report, “CDR is required to limit warming to 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” and is “part of all modeled scenarios that limit warming to 2 [degrees] by 2100.” Even when critics recognize the need for permanent CDR, they frequently fail to provide any plausible pathway to gigaton scale. The fact is that DAC doesn’t have an established, liquid market, like electricity, steel, cement, or any other commodity. That any one DAC business is struggling as it attempts to scale is not an indictment of the company, but rather an illustration of the challenge it is taking on to commercialize a first-of-a-kind technologies that naturally has first-of-a-kind issues while also building a brand new market for the crucial climate service it provides. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The commercial model for the nascent CDR industry is largely the sale of carbon removal credits for delivery in future years. This isn’t unique to CDR — it’s even analogous to the power purchase agreements that scaled renewable energy. Futures contracts are standard practice, and certainly not indicative of a “scam.”
DAC’s high energy needs are frequently cited as a reason for concern among skeptics. As the Princeton Net Zero America study notes, however, the total energy needed to reduce emissions in a net-zero system without DAC increases because we would need more power to produce e-fuels. (Jesse Jenkins, one of the leaders of the Net Zero America study, is also a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.) This criticism also fails to take into account the reduction in energy intensity that companies are already achieving by various means. That group includes Climeworks, which has introduced more efficient sorbents; Heirloom, which is working on deploying passive mineralization; and Holocene, which was recently acquired by Oxy and employs the low regeneration temperature solvents.
The costs and efficiency of DAC today, just like the cost and efficiency of solar 20 years ago, are likely to improve significantly in the future as the technology and market become more efficient and reliable. Early DAC deployments may have a relatively high cost now, but even today, DAC is cost-competitive with emissions mitigation in aviation.
The industry currently stands at a precipice. Will DAC cross the chasm from pilot facilities to meaningful deployment? Or fall off the hype wagon into the dustbin of cool ideas that were always 10 years away? Beneath the innuendo and false claims, the reporting from Reykjavik shows what everyone in DAC knew — that it has a messy, non-linear path to scale. That does not disprove the argument that it is also a necessary technology that is not only valuable to remove emissions, but also is drawing billions in investment, and driving local economic development.
And there is plenty of good news. The XRG joint venture with Adnoc shows that a sophisticated strategic investor views American DAC as promising. (The local South Texas community is excited, too.) The Oxy Stratos facility in West Texas has already brought thousands of new construction jobs, and will bring hundreds of more permanent jobs to the heart of oil country — a new industry to make use of their unique and valuable skill sets. Project Bantam, a multi-modal operation that was the largest in the U.S. when it launched last summer, is operating in Oklahoma.
The Heimildin story was written to be a salacious takedown, and DAC opponents wasted no time in saying, “We told you so.” The issue with that reaction is the story isn’t unique to Climeworks, or even to DAC. The same story could have been written 20 years ago about solar and batteries. It could be written tomorrow about advanced geothermal or long-duration energy storage. It is the boring, mundane outcome of trying to build a difficult technology with the policy and business hand we are dealt.
The road to DAC at scale will be scattered with bumps, failed projects, and folded companies. We should be cheering these folks on, not taking shots from the cheap, increasingly warm seats.
On budget negotiations, Climeworks, and a decline in shale
Current conditions: The chance of tornadoes continues through Tuesday in the Great Plains, Midwest, and South after weekend storms in the central U.S. killed at least 27 • The uncontained 18,000-acre Greer Fire in eastern Arizona is now encroaching on the towns of Greer, South Fork, and Eagar • No tropical cyclones have formed anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere yet this year. The average by May 19 is 3.5.
Late Sunday evening, lawmakers on the House Budget Committee reconvened to advance the reconciliation bill in a rare weekend vote. The package had initially failed to progress in a vote on Friday after Republican hardliners, including members of the House Freedom Caucus, expressed concerns that it did not go far enough to reduce the nation’s budget deficit. Though the package is still under negotiation — the four holdouts from Friday voted “present” to express their continued dissatisfaction — Politico reports that “Republican leaders put their commitments to the GOP holdouts in writing.” Per Punchbowl, that included House Speaker Mike Johnson proposing “a quicker phase-out of clean energy tax credits that were put into law as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Republican leaders tentatively agreed to cut off all credits by 2028.”
We’ve been closely following what such cuts — such as erasing the electric vehicle tax credit and others for energy efficiency, heat pumps, and rooftop solar, as well as deep cuts to clean energy programs — would do to the IRA. As things stand, Johnson has “a bruising negotiation ahead” as conservatives and moderate Republicans, especially those from states that have been significant beneficiaries of the economic and job-creating upsides of the IRA, remain at odds. The House Rules Committee will hold its hearing on the package on Wednesday morning at 1 a.m. — not a typo — with Republican leadership “warning us that they won’t send members home for the Memorial Day recess until the House passes the reconciliation bill,” Punchbowl writes.
The Mammoth carbon removal plant.John Moore/Getty Images
The Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks allegedly fails to capture enough carbon even to offset its own emissions, an investigation by the Icelandic newspaper Heimildin found. According to the report, since Climeworks began operations in Iceland, “it has captured a maximum of 1,000 tons of CO2 in one year” — not enough to offset its emissions of 1,700 tons of CO2 in 2023. Climeworks operates two plants in Iceland: Orca and the recently opened Mammoth, which together have captured 2,400 tons of CO2, per the report. The goal is for Mammoth to capture more than 36,000 tons per year by the time it is fully installed later in 2025.
Last week, we covered in AM that Climeworks is preparing for significant cuts to its workforce. While the company confirmed those reports, its founder, Jan Wurzbacher, pushed back on Heimildin’s investigation on LinkedIn, writing that Orca and Mammoth have together captured 1,058 tons of net CO2, explaining that “the difference between theoretical and actual output is due to various factors such as planned and unplanned down-times, weather, filtering losses” and additionally, that Mammoth is “still under ramp-up.” In a fact-check on Twitter, Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, formerly of Breakthrough Energy, added that “operational challenges are to be expected with scale up of any technology, let alone one as nascent and challenging as DAC,” but that Heimildin’s report also “clearly shows the challenges of scaling a necessary climate technology that doesn’t have a market.”
Despite his calls to “drill, baby, drill,” President Trump “is set to preside over a decline in shale production,” with U.S. oil executives warning that the industry is at a “tipping point,”The Wall Street Journal reports. Though crude oil production is expected to increase slightly in 2025, S&P Global Commodities Insights expects production to dip by 13.33 million barrels a day next year, or about 1%.
Trump’s tariffs and OPEC’s recent decision to accelerate oil production are expected to add to the decline in U.S. oil. Production in the Permian Basin was already slowing, and with oil prices around $62.49 a barrel — well below the $85 benchmark one driller said would “encourage new drilling” — many companies are “reluctant to drill through low prices,” the Journal adds. Oil and gas production in the U.S. emits more than 6 million tons of methane per year, Stanford researchers have found, with nearly 10% of the total methane volume produced in the New Mexico portion of the Permian Basin alone going straight into the atmosphere.
The offshore wind industry is preparing to take a “more aggressive approach” in response to the Trump administration’s nearly all-out halt of permits, the Financial Times reports. While the industry had initially “opted for a passive approach” to then-candidate Donald Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, FT notes that companies and industry groups have since increased spending — especially in light of the administration’s decision to cancel Equinor’s Empire Wind project south of Long Island. “The only way out is through,” Liz Burdock, the chief executive of the Oceanic Network, said at an offshore wind conference last week, adding: “It’s time we respond with strength.”
The Tesla Cybertruck is no longer the best-selling electric pickup truck in the United States, InsideEVs reports. Despite selling 39,000 Cybertrucks in 2024, Tesla has seen a company-wide slowdown as CEO Elon Musk’s popularity has cratered with his involvement in the Trump administration’s federal layoffs and program cancellations. In the first quarter of 2025, Tesla registered 7,126 Cybertrucks — falling behind the Ford F-150, which had 7,913 registrations, followed in turn by the Chevrolet Silverado EV in third place, then the GMC Sierra EV, and the Rivian R1T. At the same time, “celebrations aren’t exactly welcome,” InsideEVs writes, “seeing how even the best-selling EV truck in the U.S. has struggled to move over 7,000 units in three months.”
Electric and biodiesel-powered ambulances in New York City have brought the city’s alternative-powered vehicles to 21,500, or more than 75% of the entire fleet. Fire Commissioner Robert Tucker said the next goal was to “eventually rush to emergencies in electric fire trucks,” Gothamist reports.
The company says its first Optimus robots will start rolling off the line in “2026.”
Tesla is a car company everywhere except Wall Street. It delivered some 1.7 million cars in 2024, which were built in factories in Texas, California, Germany, and China. These car sales (and leases and sales of regulatory credits) generated some $77 billion in revenue. Its gross margin on these cars is about 18.5%, or around $14 billion.
When Tesla reported its first quarter earnings, it announced a more than 70% decline in profits, continued falling sales, and ahit to its business from the trade war with China. But its stock climbed the next day, and is now trading at around $350 a share, from $238 before the report, giving it an overall value of over $1 trillion. By some metrics, Tesla makes up more than half of the overall value of the automotive industry.
That’s because it’s not valued like a car company. The company’s investors are putting a huge stake on future innovations that largely spring from the head of Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive. These include promised self-driving cars and a self-driving taxi service, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk has said could turn into a $10 trillion business. (For reference, Walmart’s annual revenue is just under $650 billion; Walmart is also worth less than Tesla today.) So far, all we know about the Optimus is that it can dance.
One reason analysts and shareholders cheered its most recent results is because Musk committed to spending less time in Washington trying to reshape the federal government and more time with the company that makes up the lion’s share of his immense personal wealth. But just getting more of Musk’s time is the easy test. A more consequential challenge for the thesis that Tesla can be more than just a company that sells cars to people who drive them is its upcoming robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, scheduled for next month.
While Google’s Waymo already has a fully autonomous taxi system available in a few areas of a few cities, Musk has repeatedly promised that Tesla could reach full autonomy globally far more cheaply than Waymo — or, as he puts it, “Waymo needs ‘way mo’ money to succeed 😂.”
But the initial rollout of the robotaxi may be modest. Adam Jonas, a bullish Tesla analyst with Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients on Friday after a conversation with Tesla’s head of investor relations that the Austin debut will “have 10-20 cars” and “plenty of tele-ops to ensure safety levels.”
Another future Tesla business, its Optimus robot, might be able to open up its factory to tours for investors sometime in the last three months of the year, Jonas reported, with commercialization coming by the middle of 2026 at a cost of around $20,000 per unit. The company aims to produce “several thousand” robots by the end of this year, he said. (Though you should be skeptical of any and all dates and deadlines given by Tesla — Musk has been promising an imminent fleet of autonomous Teslas for over five years.) Right now, Jonas wrote, about 12 are being produced at a time, more or less by hand.
And that’s just the mechanics. The software for humanoid autonomy also isn’t there yet: “Tesla admits both intelligence and cost ‘need to come a long way’ to unlock the true potential of humanoid robots,” Jonas wrote. “The neural nets for Optimus are far larger than for cars given greater degrees-of-freedom and far more open-ended tasks.”
Tesla also has more prosaic worries for these next generation businesses. Company officials told Jonas that they’re in an “incredibly competitive” hiring market, especially compared to Chinese companies, which “own the supply chain” for advanced technologies.
While Tesla and Musk are eager to tell the public that the company is orienting itself toward an AI-driven robotic future, some of its other corporate actions may reflect the more present-day concerns of brand management. Tesla sales have declined sharply overseas, and its showrooms have become sites for protest, driven by anger over Musk’s role in the Trump administration.
The company said Friday that it would welcome a new member of its board: Jack Hartung, president and chief strategy officer of Chipotle, a brand with its own history of crisis, stock market volatility, and precarious executive leadership. While it’s unlikely Tesla will get involved in the food business anytime soon, it may benefitfrom learning from Chipotle’s struggles over the last few years of giving people what they expect.