Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The Iran war has been a gift to the country’s vehicle, solar, and battery business.
Fossil fuels are the real October surprise.
The Trump administration has asked a court to re-examine a key permit for Revolution Wind in Rhode Island.
What 700 math problems say about the AI economy’s biggest open question
Many nonprofits representing the environmental and climate movement are split.
Local opposition has exacted a much higher cost for developers than has been previously understood, according to new Heatmap Pro survey of public records and financial information.
The country’s largest technology companies are expected to spend more than $800 billion this year investing in data centers and artificial intelligence.
But new data suggests the local backlash to data centers may be taking a meaningful bite out of that boom.
At least $260 billion of data center investments were canceled this year after sustained local opposition, according to new Heatmap Pro data.
The pace and size of those cancellations is picking up. About $130 billion in data center investment — or about half of the total — was canceled in the three months ending on September 30. And in dollar terms, the size of canceled projects in the third quarter of 2026 exceeded the size of all data center projects canceled last year.
Roughly $1 trillion in data center investment now faces some kind of sustained or meaningful local opposition, according to Heatmap Pro data. About half of all projects that have met local backlash this year were ultimately canceled, our data suggests.
Our market intelligence service Heatmap Pro tracks local projects and regulations affecting clean energy, batteries, and data centers. We run a continuous survey of public officials, regulatory filings, and local media to monitor energy and data center cancellations nationwide.
Our investment figures, which have not been previously published and are larger than other estimates, are likely an undercount. Only about 60% of data center projects disclose the size of their planned investment, especially during a proposal’s early stage when it is most likely to run aground.
These figures also do not include every project currently stalled because of state-level data center moratoriums in Texas and New York.
But the totals show that the surging backlash to data centers is beginning to kill a sizable share of large computing projects. In August, a Heatmap Pro and Embold Research poll found that 75% of Americans would oppose a data center getting built near where they live — a striking change from a year earlier, when Americans were roughly split over the projects.
“The number of canceled data centers speaks to the vast and growing grassroots opposition to these projects in communities across the country. The fact that many of these projects were defeated in just the past few months speaks to the upward trajectory of this opposition movement,” Mitch Jones, a policy director at Food and Water Watch, an environmental group that opposes AI data centers, said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the Data Center Coalition, which advocates for the industry, did not respond before press time.
Most canceled data center projects in our database are terminated because they fail to secure a local permit or face a hostile local government action. Hundreds of U.S. counties and towns now maintain a ban or moratorium on data center construction, our data shows. The Senate’s bipartisan permitting reform proposal would not affect towns or counties’ ability to prohibit data center development under their jurisdiction.
The global vehicle market is splitting into two — with just a few exception.
The past three months have been crucial for Rivian, America’s biggest all-electric car company not run by Elon Musk.
The California-based automaker debuted the R2, its long-awaited and somewhat more affordable sport utility vehicle. (Our reviewer gave it high marks.) Rivian also formally took out a nearly $6.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy to finance its new Georgia factory. And it finally unveiled the plans for that facility, which will include a rail tie-in and a 1,000-acre preserved woodland.
All that was well and good, but the crucial question remained: How is the R2 selling? And the answer is: Pretty well, seemingly! Rivian delivered 19,248 vehicles last quarter, beating analyst expectations and setting a new all-time quarterly sales record. More importantly, its vehicle deliveries have now recovered above where they stood in the third quarter of last year — a key milestone, since President Trump and Congress ended the federal government’s consumer-side EV incentives last September.
Tesla is seemingly also about to clear that threshold, although nobody outside the firm knows for sure. Elon Musk’s company doesn’t break out its sales by continent or model, but it delivered 486,532 vehicles last year — just about 2% below last year’s third quarter results. (Although a few of Rivian’s Amazon delivery vans have made their way into fleets abroad, the company only sells its consumer R1 and R2 vehicles in the United States and Canada, so its sales data is mostly U.S. by default.)
Alas, those two stand alone for now. No other automaker is close to breaking its quarterly EV sales record in the United States, and Ford, General Motors, and Hyundai all saw their domestic EV sales crumble last quarter. The new Chevrolet Bolt, GM’s most affordable EV — and its only American-made vehicle of any kind priced below $30,000 — has sold abysmally, moving just 8,090 units since the year began. The company is now likely to cap its production run at 35,000 units sold; it initially planned to produce 150,000.
Looking at these trends, I think you can see two different phenomena taking place.
The first is a big and growing divergence between America’s transportation sector and the rest of the world’s. The oil supply shock triggered by America’s war in Iran (and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz) may be driving a long-term shift, encouraging consumers and countries to move away from oil. But for now, the crisis’s high prices have hit parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia far worse than they’ve impacted much of North America. Global EV sales reached a record high in the spring, for instance — just not in the United States.
The second is that we’re seeing demand destruction without decarbonization. According to new Nikkei data, gasoline-only cars made up less than half of global new car sales during the six months of 2026.
That’s never happened before, and it is a remarkable change: Gasoline-only cars have lost about a quarter of their global market share in less than five years. But as consumers switched away from gasoline, they didn’t move only to battery-only cars — instead, more than half of them shifted to hybrids or plug-in hybrids. That shift is good news, in that it will depress global oil use and therefore global greenhouse-gas emissions. But it won’t allow for the possibility of zeroing out emissions in the same way that EVs can.
But sometimes demand destruction will cut emissions significantly. If want to see that in the United States, check out the diesel market. As my colleague Alexander Kaufman wrote about this morning, FedEx has responded to eye-watering domestic diesel prices by placing an order for 2,000 electric box trucks with the California-based automaker Harbinger Motors. The shipper believes that the move will save it $800 million in fuel costs over time. When I talked to John Henry Harris, Harbinger’s CEO, last year, he told me the company didn’t need tax credits to sell vehicles — the math justified it on its own. Seems like FedEx agrees.
