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For every level of laundry needs.
Americans love laundry. Of the common household chores, it is
by far the most popular — and the most energy-intensive. Washing and drying a load of laundry every two days for a year generates roughly the same emissions as driving from Chicago to New York and back again in a gasoline-powered passenger vehicle. Nearly three-quarters of those emissions come from drying alone; meanwhile, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average washing machine generates up to 8% of a home’s total energy use. The whole process can cost up to $150 per year in electricity alone, depending on where you live and the frequency of your washes.
With some regulatory prodding, manufacturers have tried to improve water and energy efficiency in new appliances and have rolled out fancy new features like “smart” water-level sensors, vibration reduction technologies, and microfiber-catching filters. But not every house — or budget — has room for the latest and greatest technologies, and systems that would work well in an airy Los Angeles laundry room might make less sense in a drafty apartment in Minnesota.
Heatmap is here to remove some of the guesswork from upgrading one of your home’s most-used appliances. Here is our expert panel’s insight into when and how to purchase a new washer and dryer for your home.
Joanna Mauer is the deputy director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a non-profit advocacy group pushing for stricter energy efficiency legislation. In her role at ASAP, Mauer works with the Department of Energy on its efficiency rules for residential appliances. She has previously worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Center for Integrative Environmental Research.
Amber McDaniel is the head of content at Sustainable Jungle, a website and podcast that publishes tips, tricks, and product reviews, including for major household appliances, with a focus on environmentally friendly solutions.
Scott Flint is a licensed California appliance tech with 30 years of experience. He is known as the Fix-It Guy on his YouTube channel, where he promotes the upkeep and repair of home appliances to extend their use. He has also written extensively about washers and dryers for publications such as The Family Handyman, Taste Of Home, and Earth911.
Peruse the latest washers and dryers and you’ll see features like sensors that adjust the water level to match the load of laundry, voice-activated start buttons, WiFi-enabled push notifications for when it’s time to move a load to the dryer, and more. And while there are environmentally friendly upsides to some of these features, “the more simple the machine, the less likely that things will fail,” Flint told me. In his experience repairing hundreds of washers and dryers over the years, “People save money on their initial purchase and the machine is going to last longer if you can minimize the features.”
The Energy Star certification is a great starting point in your shopping journey. But it shouldn’t be the be-all, end-all of your research. Energy Star represents a range of efficiency standards from different brands, with only the top models earning a “ Most Efficient” distinction.
You’ll still want to read reviews to get a better understanding of the reliability of the products you’re looking at, too. Though many new features on the market promise water and energy savings, they’re harder to repair yourself, meaning any potential fixes can get expensive. They can also have shorter lifespans than simpler models.
Eco-friendly washers and dryers are great for a whole laundry list (get it?) of reasons: They lower your household energy bill, they reduce emissions, they reduce wasted water, they’re often easier to install, and they can be gentler on your clothes. But they don’t necessarily save you time. Energy-efficient electric dryers can take up to twice as long to dry your clothes than traditional gas dryers. Still, all of our expert panelists agreed the upsides outweigh the drawbacks.
Yes, this is a buying guide for purchasing a new washer and dryer. But before you spend money on new appliances, you should consider working with what you already have.
If you’re dealing with an old or sub-optimally functional machine and wondering whether now is the time to upgrade, repairing your existing washer or dryer can actually be a smarter and thriftier solution; in fact, Consumer Reportsonly recommends replacing a dryer if it’s over 10 years old, electric, and cost less than $700 when you initially purchased it. Often, whatever’s going on doesn’t even require a professional to fix. “I think only rarely — let’s say about 20% of the time — would most people need to call in a technician,” Flint told me. Most washer and dryer problems are something you can fix using “normal household tools.” (More on that later.)
Keep in mind, even if you have an old washer or dryer that isn’t very energy efficient, “that’s still not even going to come close to touching the amount of energy that was used to produce and ship a new machine,” McDaniel told me. When your washer or dryer “actually fully stops working and it’s not doing what you need it to do — that’s when it’s time to upgrade.”
Typically, 1.5 to 3.4 cubic feet of capacity is suitable for a one- to two-person household, 3.5 to 4.4 cubic feet will do for two to three people, and 4.5 or more cubic feet will serve a household with more than three people. But having a new baby or pets might mean you do more loads of laundry than an average household, in which case sizing up is better.
Flint told me a common mistake he sees people make is overloading their washing machines, which can destroy an appliance’s rear bearing — the part of the machine that helps the drum rotate smoothly — a repair that is often so costly, it can make more sense to junk the whole machine. On the other hand, running small loads in a large-capacity washing machine can mean wasting water cleaning not-as-many clothes. Consider what washing machine would make the most sense for your needs to maximize efficiency.
Energy and water efficiency are two of the most common considerations when buying a washer and dryer, and are the primary focus of this guide. Some consumers may have additional concerns — McDaniel, for example, recommended looking for a Restriction of Hazardous Substances certification, which signals that an appliance complies with limits on heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Ethical considerations — including a manufacturer’s contributions to armed conflicts, labor practices, and sourcing of conflict minerals — are also worth close inspection. Ethical Consumer offers an excellent guide for finding a brand that best aligns with your values.
“The first thing that we always recommend is: If you need something new, try to go refurbished,” McDaniel told me. Still, there’s a right way and a wrong way to make a major second-hand purchase. McDaniel suggested going through a reputable source that offers a warranty, such as Best Buy (when searching online, make sure to filters for “Energy Star” and “open box” and check the product’s condition).
If you prefer the security of a new product, then it’s time to familiarize yourself with the Energy Star website. You can sort by Energy Star Most Efficient, which are the best of the best, as well as by price, brand, volume, front-load vs. top-load, vented, ventless, heat pump, gas, electric, and more. Energy Star also makes it easy to compare the specs of different products (just tick the “compare” box next to the machines you’re looking at, then scroll to the top to hit the orange “compare” button when you’re ready).
Dryers are the biggest energy suck in most homes, using two to four times as much energy as new washers and nearly twice as much as new refrigerators. McDaniel told me they are also responsible for the greatest wear and tear on clothes. Dryers are an especially American phenomenon; while more than 80% of households in the U.S. own a dryer, just 30% of European households do. That is to say, you probably don’t actually need one, and if you need to save money or space in your laundry routine, this would be the best place to look to make a cut.
“Not relying on a dryer is huge. I only use mine in the wintertime, and in the summer, I line dry my clothes — and the only reason I don’t do that in the winter is I literally don’t have the space inside,” McDaniel said.
Traditional vented dryers — the energy guzzlers of the American home — aren’t the only option anymore, though. The next best thing to a clothesline is a heat pump dryer, which Mauer told me is the “most efficient clothes dryer on the market today,” often far exceeding the Energy Star requirements. Heat pump dryers have a lower maximum temperature, though, so you don’t get that hot-out-of-the-dryer feel when the load is finished. It can also take an hour or more to dry a load of laundry fully. The bright side: Because the heat is lower, heat pump dryers are much gentler on your clothes.
“A big red flag for us is brands that don’t warranty their products in any capacity,” McDaniel told me. Buying a washer or dryer that is durable is important — Flint told me you should expect to get at least a decade of use out of a washer and dryer with proper maintenance and minor repairs — and a warranty is evidence that a company is building a product that they trust to last.
The Electrolux ELFW7637AT has one of the highest energy- and water-efficiency ratings of any washing machine on the market in 2024, with an IMEF of 3.2 and an integrated water factor of 2.6 — both of which are exceptional even by Energy Star’s standards. It also works. Reviewers have lauded its SmartBoost stain removal technology, its internal water heater, and its straightforward controls, although its 85-minute cycle time is a little longer than many other washers on the market.
Both Flint and McDaniel spoke highly of the German brand Miele, which makes this compact washing machine. Though its capacity is about half that of the Electrolux and it didn’t earn Energy Star’s highest level of certification (it has an IMEF of 2.9 and a IWF of 3.2), it is one of the more reliable and best-reviewed washers on the market.
Admittedly, you have to pay for that kind of dependability — Miele is a high-end brand with a sticker price that reflects it. The WXI860 gets high marks for its cleaning ability, including fill-and-forget auto-dispensing features, and boasts 72% lower energy consumption than conventional washers. Additionally, Miele has “a honeycomb-drum technology, so that when it puts the clothes in the spin cycle, it creates a thin film of water between the drum wall and the laundry,” McDaniel told me, which helps prevent clothing fibers from getting caught. “Little features like that that help keep our clothes in circulation for longer are also more sustainable.”
Mauer swears by heat pump dryers, and there are a number of good choices on the market right now. Beko is a favorite of the Sustainable Jungle team, in part because it has a filtration system to stop microplastics from synthetic fabrics from entering the waterways, as well as the company’s ambitious commitments to low-waste and recycled materials. This ventless Beko heat pump dryer is tiny but mighty, making it a great fit for small spaces (it can even fit under the kitchen counter), and it boasts a 2023 “Most Efficient” rating from Energy Star.
Being a heat pump dryer, though, it can take a while to dry clothes — one tester found it took 227 minutes to dry a large, bulky load to 100% — but plan ahead and Beko can give you major savings in the long run. Or, if the Beko isn’t quite what you’re looking for, check out Miele, which makes its own well-reviewed heat pump dryer (although it is small and pricy).
If a heat-pump dryer isn’t right for your lifestyle, the Electrolux ELFE7637AT is one of the more impressive electric dryers on the market right now, earning the Energy Star seal of approval. While it still isn’t super fast (fast takes a lot of heat, which takes a lot of energy, which makes a machine less efficient), reviewers say it can get a large load to 100% dry in 60 minutes if need be. It’s also the best-rated electric dryer on Consumer Reports’ list that isn’t one of the Samsung, LG, or GE models that Flint frequently gets called out to fix.
This combo washer-dryer uses heat pump technology in its dryer, making it one of the more energy-efficient single-unit models on the market. Unlike some of the other options on this list, however, its larger 4.8 cubic foot drum size is big enough for a two- or three-person household. While combo washer/dryers still have some downsides over their two-piece counterparts, including decreased efficiency in cleaning and especially drying, this is one of the better-reviewed units on the market.
Flint told me that you can often find older Kenmore Whirlpool series 80 machines on Craigslist that are “ really good, and tend to sell for about $250 when refurbished, and often come with a one-year warranty.” The only detriment, he said, is that they’re top-loaders — which waste a lot of water — but “if somebody just really needs a tough machine that is going to last, that was a really good design.”
Congratulations! You’re now the proud owner of a new washer and dryer. What happens now?
New washers and dryers are unfortunately not designed with longevity in mind — but that doesn’t mean you need to replace them if something goes wrong after four or five years.
“I can go up to a washing machine that is sitting in the dump, and I can open up the door, and I can spin the spin basket, and I can tell that it’s a perfectly good machine,” Flint told me.
Flint estimates that only about 20% of the time do people actually need to call in a technician to repair their appliances, pointing to fixes like replacing a blown fuse, unsticking a front-load washer that won’t spin, and swapping out a moldy washer door gasket as deceptively simple tasks. Get acquainted with DIY YouTube channels like Flint’s or repair blogs that explain solutions to common problems.
Still, sometimes you need to call in the big guns. In that case, Flint recommends doing your due diligence on a review service like Yelp beforehand.
Once you find someone you like, reach out with the model number of your machine and the symptom you’re experiencing and the technician “should be able to provide you a quote without coming out if they know what they’re doing,” Flint said. If someone does have to come out to figure out what’s going on, then that visit should be free. “Don’t go with someone who’s going to charge you to come out and diagnose the problem and then charge you to fix it.” Repairs to a front-loading washer will probably run around $170, according to Consumer Reports.
You can extend the life of your washer or dryer by following a few more rules of thumb.
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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.