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An energy-efficient home needs energy-efficient lightbulbs and air conditioners and refrigerators and other gadgets to fill it up. But it all starts with the structure itself. That’s why we recommend you take a good, hard look at your walls, ceiling, floors, windows, doors, roof, and electrical wiring as a first step towards decarbonizing your home life. (Embarking on a renovation? Heatmap has a guide for that.)
When you add air sealing and insulation, get energy efficient windows, or a cool roof that reflects heat back into the environment, you’re either preventing heat from entering or escaping. This stabilizes your indoor air temperature, thereby reducing your heating and cooling loads, which account for 55% of a household’s total energy use, on average. Making these improvements is not only good for the environment, it’s also a boon to your quality of life. Plus, it allows you to get the most bang out of one of Heatmap’s other favorite decarbonization upgrades: replacing your furnace with an electric heat pump, which operates most efficiently in a well-insulated home.
And lest we forget the electrification upgrades, they’re certainly a different beast than the aforementioned ways to seal up your house. But adding new electrical circuits is a prerequisite to installing energy-efficient appliances such as electric stoves, dryers, heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, or EV chargers. And depending how much space is on your electric panel, you might need to upgrade that too.
None of the investments mentioned here (often referred to as weatherization upgrades) will directly decarbonize your space. Insulating your attic won’t free you from fossil fuels, and installing new wiring doesn’t actually electrify anything in and of itself, although they will lower your energy-related emissions. But what these renovations do do is prime you to consume less energy at home just keeping yourself comfortable.
“The weather that you can expect to see where you live is changing over time and changing in a pretty unpredictable manner,” Michael Gartman, a manager at RMI on their carbon-free buildings team, told me. “The benefit of weatherization, unlike some of the other decarbonization measures that you might be thinking about, is it really just shelters you from whatever that change means over time.”
None of this sounds very thrilling, I know. These types of upgrades certainly won’t lead to the same oohs and ahhs that you’d get for buying a shiny new electric vehicle or induction stove. “You often can't see weatherization after it's been completed, and even if you can, I don't think many people are going to be taking guests into their basement and pointing at their floor joists and saying, look at all that insulation,” Gartman told me.
Probably not, but once folks spend some time inside your house, the benefits will become apparent in cooler summer days and cozier winter nights — and lower energy bills. “Even if it’s not sexy, that's something that you're going to feel every year that you're in your home,” Gartman said.
These upgrades that you’re considering — and the attendant reductions in energy use — will have impacts that ripple out beyond your home’s walls and onto the grid at large. After all, residential energy consumption makes up 21% of total energy use in the U.S., and 15% of total emissions.
“Weatherization can reduce peak demand on the grid, which reduces the likelihood of the grid going down in the coldest winter nights or hottest summer days,” Gartman told me. This makes the grid greener, too, as utilities often meet demand spikes by calling on fossil fuel sources such as gas plants, which can ramp up and down quickly. A smoother demand curve can thereby increase the share of renewables in the mix. And in the case that the grid does fail and the power goes out, a fully weatherized home is a safer home, protecting you and your family from the elements for as long as possible.
Depending on what weatherization measures you go with, as well as your specific circumstances, your savings could eventually surpass your upfront costs. The upgrade that’s most likely to pay for itself is air sealing and insulation, which can lead to energy bills that are 10% to 20% smaller, leading to net savings in just a few years. The Green Building Alliance says cool roofs — which are not suited to every environment — can also pay for themselves in as little as six years. And while complete window replacements are a particularly pricey upgrade, if you opt for storm windows that are installed on top of an existing window, you could see payback as soon as three years time post-installation.
No matter what you choose to do, the absolute best time to do it is when prices are low — and when it comes to energy efficiency upgrades, the discounts have arrived. “A lot of energy performance improvements to houses right now are on sale, and they're going to be on sale until the end of the decade,” Eric Werling, former national director of the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Homes program, told me. He’s referencing the $1,200 federal tax credit for weatherization, which is available now, and the home efficiency and electrification rebates that will be rolling out this year and next.
But even with this years-long sale, we know that the upfront costs can be tough to shoulder. So don’t feel pressure to drop thousands in the name of decarbonization right now. If you stay in your spot long enough, you’ll eventually need to undertake at least a few home improvement projects. “Anytime anybody does a renovation project or fixes a problem in the house,” Werling told me, “I implore them to think about, is there an opportunity for me to make improvements to the house that will pay for themselves in utility cost savings, but also improve the health and safety and comfort of the house that we live in?”
You’ll find the answer is often yes, and we encourage you to let your friends, family, and neighbors know about it. Because while we trust that you, as a reader, care deeply about the climate, you don’t actually need to give a hoot to benefit from energy efficiency upgrades. As Werling put it, “It's just not about energy, and it's just not about the climate. It's about your home.”
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Riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area are staring down budget crises, with deep service cuts not far behind.
Three of the country’s largest public transportation systems are facing severe budget shortfalls that have left them near a breaking point. Transit riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area of California could see severe service cuts as soon as next year if their representatives don’t secure funding to fill significant gaps in their operations budgets, the result of dwindling ridership and federal aid.
Should these lawmakers fail or fall short, they could kick off what transit advocates refer to as a “death spiral,” where higher fares and worse service leads to lower ridership, which leads to more cuts, etc., until there’s effectively no service left.
“I think that in a lot of cases, the public, legislators, governors are maybe not aware of just how high the stakes are right now,” David Weiskopf, the senior policy director for Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that helps to elect climate-minded politicians, told me.
Public transit is a uniquely tricky, political issue, as it requires convincing elected officials from across a given state to address an issue that primarily affects people in one concentrated region — even if that region happens to be one of the main economic engines of the entire state economy. And yet transportation is the No. 1 way Americans contribute to climate change. While electric vehicles get a lot more attention as a climate solution, expanding public transit can also reduce emissions with the added benefits of minimizing the raw materials extraction and electricity demand that come along with EVs.
But that’s just a part of what Weiskopf is talking about in terms of the stakes. Millions of people rely on public transit to get themselves to work and their kids to school. Public transit also reduces local air pollution and traffic. Losing the services that already exist would surrender all of those benefits — worsening affordability and quality of life just as they have become top-tier political issues.
There’s a clear chain of events that led so many major transit systems to the brink of collapse this year. In the late 1990s, Congress eliminated federal funding for public transit operations in major cities, instead allocating all of its financial assistance to capital transit projects, such as new or improved infrastructure. Buses and metros began to rely more heavily on revenue from fares to cover operating expenses like staff and fuel. That became disastrous when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and cut ridership dramatically.
Congress passed a series of pandemic relief laws that provided substantial funding for transit operations, keeping them afloat to shuttle essential workers. But that money dried up, and in many places, ridership has remained stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels for reasons including the rise in remote work. Meanwhile, transit systems continued to age, and the cost of labor and materials rose.
State lawmakers have been slow to act, allowing their biggest cities’ transit systems to inch dangerously close to the edge of a fiscal cliff. In Illinois, the legislature has just a few days left in its session to find the money to prevent layoffs and service cuts across Chicago’s three transit systems next year. In California, the state is hammering out a stopgap loan to keep Bay Area operators funded through 2026, while betting the longer-term health of the system on a ballot measure next fall. The split Pennsylvania legislature is at a total impasse on the issue. Governor Josh Shapiro recently authorized transit agencies to dip into their capital budgets to prevent immediate service cuts, but there’s no longer-term solution in sight.
These three states are not entirely unique — almost every public transit system in the country is dealing with the same challenges. But they’re useful case studies to illustrate just how high the stakes are, and what kinds of solutions are on the table.
Prior to the pandemic, two of San Francisco’s regional rail systems — Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, and Cal Train — were covering upwards of 70% of their operating costs with fares, Sebastian Petty, the senior transportation policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, told me. In 2024, however, fare revenue was roughly half of what it was in 2019, covering just under a third of the cost of running the system, with the rest filled in by emergency federal assistance. “There’s no real, obvious path to financial sustainability that doesn't involve some longer source of sustained new public funding,” Petty said.
BART now projects that its COVID relief funding will be gone by spring of next year, after which it will face a deficit of $350 million to $400 million per year. The implications are catastrophic. The fixed costs of operating the system are so high that service cuts alone can’t make up the shortfall. BART estimates that even if it cut service by 90% — including closing at 9 p.m., cutting frequency from every 20 minutes to once an hour, shutting down two full train lines, laying off more than 1,000 workers — that would not be enough to close the gap.
The legislature decided on a regional sales tax as the best way to fund the system, but has left the final say in the matter up to voters. In September, lawmakers passed a bill that authorized a ballot measure in five Bay Area counties next year. Voters will be asked to approve a sales tax increase of half a cent — or a full cent, in the case of San Francisco — for a period of 14 years.
Regardless of whether the ballot measure is successful, however, the transit system still faces a fiscal cliff next year without some kind of bridge funding. A separate bill requires the state Department of Finance to propose a solution for short-term financial assistance for Bay Area transit agencies to bridge the roughly $750 million budget gap for the next year to prevent immediate service cuts. The department has a deadline of January 10, after which the legislature will have to vote on the proposal.
“To be frank, this is not a great position to be in,” Petty said. “People are really, really worried.” But he said this still seems like the best path forward given how large the scale of money needed is. “I say this as someone who’s worked in transit for a while,” Petty told me. “Transit seems to be in some degree of perpetual funding challenge, but this one really is different.”
Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority, which governs the area’s three transit companies, says that it faces a $230 million budget shortfall next year, which could increase nearly fourfold in 2027 without new funding. The agency has warned that it will begin cutting paratransit service for people with disabilities as soon as April, which will expand to main line service and layoffs over the summer if the legislature can’t agree on a new revenue source this month.
Amy Rynell, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit, told me the uncertainty alone has hurt the transit operators’ ability to plan. “The agencies are having to spend a lot of time putting forth multiple budgets to figure out what to do in this moment,” she said. “That’s detracting from the ability to build for the future and develop new projects. People are having to look at keeping the doors open versus making transit better.”
Lawmakers in Illinois spent much of the first half of the year trying to nail down a deal, but they prioritized working on reforms to the regional transit system before figuring out how to fund it. On May 31, during the final hours of the regular legislative session, the state Senate passed a bill that would create several revenue raisers for public transit, such as a statewide $1.50 “Climate Impact Fee” on retail deliveries, a statewide electric vehicle charging fee, a real estate transfer tax, and a tax on rideshare services like Uber and Lyft. But lawmakers in the House claimed they didn’t have enough time to review the implications of such measures. An earlier idea to increase tolls died in the face of opposition from lawmakers representing the suburbs as well as labor groups.
The legislature has just three days left — October 28 through 30 — in a special veto session to reach an agreement on transit funding. Rynell was optimistic that it would get there. “It remains a priority of the House, Senate, and governor’s team,” she said. “People have put a lot of time and effort into getting a good package because the legislative leaders don’t want to be back in the same place in five or 10 years.”
For two years in a row, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, has narrowly avoided a fiscal crisis with stopgap solutions from the governor’s office after the legislature failed to secure any transit funding. In November 2024, Governor Shapiro got approval from the Biden administration to transfer $153 million in federal capital highway funds to SEPTA, preventing immediate service cuts and postponing a 21% fare hike. But the agency still anticipated a $213 million gap, and said it would have to implement both the rate hike and service cuts this fall unless it secured additional funding.
The funding never came. The Pennsylvania legislature, paralyzed by a one-seat Democratic majority in the House and a Republican Senate, let a June 30 state budget deadline come and go. “Five of these funding bills, sort of different permutations, passed the State House that would have given sustainable revenue for transit,” Stephen Bronskill, the coalition manager at Transit Forward Philadelphia, told me. “All these bills were bipartisan. They failed in the State Senate.”
Weeks of uncertainty and chaos followed. In late August, SEPTA followed through with raising fares and began cutting service. Just two weeks later, however, a court sided with consumer rights advocates who argued that the cuts disproportionately impacted people of color and low-income riders, and ordered SEPTA to restore service.
During those two weeks, residents got a taste of what the future could hold: workers late to work, students late to class, overcrowded buses and trolleys, confusion about which routes were still operating. After the court order, SEPTA turned to a desperate measure — a request to use up to $394 million of state funds designated for capital expenditures on its operations, instead. The move would preserve full service for two years, but at the expense of infrastructure repairs and upgrades. Governor Shapiro approved the request.
“It’s a Band-Aid solution, and no new money for transit has been allocated,” Bronskill said. It’s also a particularly terrible time to deplete SEPTA’s capital budget, as its aging railcars are becoming dangerous to operate. There have been five fires on SEPTA railcars in 2025 alone. A recent report from the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Authority’s 1970s-era “silverliner” cars, which make up about 60% of the fleet, predate federal fire safety hazards and require either extensive retrofits or replacement.
The money will also only benefit transit systems in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Bronskill noted. “Every other transit agency across the state faces the same cliff of having to cut service in the face of the deficits. So we are continuing this fight.”
Pennsylvania lawmakers have proposed some of the same ideas that have been floated in Illinois to raise money for transit. They’ve also considered a car rental and lease tax, diverting funding from the state sales tax, taxing so-called “skill games” common at bars and convenience stores, and legalizing recreational marijuana.
To Justin Balik, the state program director for the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, the challenge is not so much about coming up with revenue options as mustering “political will and urgency and prioritization.”
But more than anything, Pennsylvania suffers partisan politics and total paralysis due to its split legislature, which is now more than 100 days past the deadline to set even a basic state budget for next year. “I think once that is done, we all have our work cut out for us to tell the story in a compelling way of why the problem isn't solved and why we need faster action on this,” Balik said.
Evergreen is part of a new coalition of environmental and transit advocacy groups and think tanks called the Clean RIDES Network, which stands for Responsible Investments to Decrease Emissions in States, that’s trying to engender the political will for and prioritization of clean transportation solutions in statehouses around the country. The group is advocating for “a more holistic plan for transportation advocacy” that brings together ideas like avoiding highway expansions, improving transit access and efficiencies, and investing in vehicle electrification. Over 100 organizations are involved, including national groups like RMI, Sierra Club, and the NRDC, as well as state advocacy outfits like the Clean Air Council in Pennsylvania and Active Transportation Alliance in Illinois.
Advocates like Balik and Weiskopf, of Climate Cabinet, argued that it’s the right time to put transportation at the front and center of the climate fight. While there’s little state leaders can do to counter President Trump’s actions to weaken U.S. climate policy, public transit is one of the few areas they control. “This is a place that all of these lawmakers have the opportunity to do something meaningful and effective,” Weiskopf said, “even if it is just to prevent another thing from becoming much worse.”
On Detroit layoffs, critical mineral woes, and China hawks vs. cheap energy
Current conditions: Two tropical waves are moving westward across the Atlantic, with atmospheric conditions primed to develop into a storm in the Caribbean • Douala, Cameroon’s largest city and economic capital, notched its highest October temperature since records began in the 1800s, at nearly 95 degrees Fahrenheit • In Spain, average temperatures have eclipsed 86 degrees every day of this month so far.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Alex Wong/Getty Images
On Friday afternoon, Politico published an explosive story suggesting that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright had strained his relationship with President Donald Trump by taking too deliberative an approach and consulting industry before slashing clean energy programs. The report, based on conversations with 10 anonymous sources, teased the possibility that Wright could end up departing the agency. “It just seems so messy right now,” one of the sources said in reference to the relationship. “I don’t know how much longer he’s got.” The frustration, the story indicated, was mutual. The former chief executive of the fracking giant Liberty Energy, Wright reportedly “has been dissatisfied for some time with taking direction from the White House and the strictures of government after years of running his own company,” a dynamic that mirrors issues former Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Rex Tillerson faced as Secretary of State in Trump’s first administration.
When I reached out to an insider with knowledge of the agency, the source told me the story was months behind and no longer reflected the current relationship between Wright and the White House. Other Republicans certainly don’t see Wright’s approach to cutting clean energy programs as too cautious. In an interview with another Politico reporter, Josh Siegel, Utah Senator John Curtis said Wright “does have concerns about too many renewables going onto the market. I don’t. With time my approach has proven right and it will again, in that the government needs to play a productive role in providing affordable, reliable, clean energy.” Meanwhile, more than a third of Americans say their electricity bills are a “major” source of stress, according to a new Associated Press poll.
The Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation last week rescinded a policy requiring the nation’s biggest banks and lenders to factor risks from climate change into longterm planning, The New York Times reported Friday. The Federal Reserve Board staff had called the Biden-era policy “distracting” and “not necessary,” and regulators now said the existing rules that banks “consider and appropriately address all material financial risks” were enough. Critics said the rule change was a cynical ploy to boost fossil fuel production and blamed the FDIC board, whose appointees include White House budget director Russell Vought, for putting the U.S. economy at risk of higher costs as warming worsens.
Auto parts manufacturer Dana Incorporated laid off more than 100 employees from its electric vehicle battery factory in Auburn Hills, Michigan, last week, as the Trump administration’s funding cuts begin to take effect in the broader economy. The pink slips came abruptly. “It’s hard. It’s hard. I’m a single mom of four. So this unexpected layoff is even harder,” one worker, Kassandra Pojok, told the local broadcaster Fox 2. “There are a lot of single parents, a lot of people who are wondering, ‘How are we going to pay our rent?’ We have one check, not even a full check left. We were told not to work our last day.”
The job cuts come in the wake of the Heatmap’s Jeva Lange called “a multi-front blitz on EVs.” The president’s landmark tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, terminated the country’s main federal tax credit for electric vehicles last month. The dramatically shortened deadline led to a surge in EV purchases in the last three months before the tax credit disappeared. “This decision is the result of the unexpected and immediate reduction in customer orders driven by lower demand for electric vehicles, which has rendered continued operations at the plant no longer viable,” Dana Incorporated said in a statement. The factory closure marked “the third time in two months that clean energy manufacturing jobs in Michigan have been put on hold or canceled,” according to the advocacy group Climate Power.
As regular readers of this newsletter know, China is ratcheting up export restrictions on critical minerals such as rare earths. On Friday, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that minerals are “America’s most dangerous dependence.” In a blog post on the influential think tank’s website, Michael Froman warned that China could restrict global access to critical mineral products, including rare earth magnets, and bring much economic activity to a screeching halt.” As the most recent export controls show, “China is willing and able to exploit this strategic vulnerability,” he wrote. “It has already proven its willingness to use export controls as a tool of economic coercion.”
To accelerate domestic production in the U.S., the Trump administration has taken ownership stakes in mining projects, speeded up permitting, and started stockpiling minerals for the military. By gutting the electric vehicle tax credit, however, the administration eliminated one of the most significant sources of demand for mineral production, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote earlier this year, calling it the “paradox” of Trump’s mining policy. As I reported on Friday for Heatmap, overseas mining projects in developing countries don’t always work out; just look at what chaos the coup of Madagascar has created for Denver-based Energy Fuels’ mine in the African nation. But the U.S. can’t go it alone on metals. “While it might be important for the United States to develop some production capacity here at home, it doesn’t have to play catch up entirely on its own,” Froman wrote. “It should work with allies and partners to bring mining and production facilities online more quickly.”
The West can’t lower its energy costs without working with Chinese companies, according to an executive from one of China’s biggest wind turbine manufacturers. While Kai Wu, the vice president of Goldwind, said it was “fully understandable” that foreign governments want to strengthen local supply chains, China’s cost advantage in turbine manufacturing had grown “huge,” at about “40%, at least” compared to Western rivals, he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I always ask them: are you ready to sacrifice the cost of energy? Everybody wants to have the best salary and the lowest workload, but it’s not reality.”
The provocative statements came as fellow Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced plans for a factory in Scotland as part of a push into Europe. It’s coming as China’s own market matures. As I reported in this newsletter in July, Chinese solar installations plunged 85% when the country removed incentives for more panel deployments. With the rate of deployment decreasing, Chinese manufacturers are looking overseas for new markets, as Matthew reported last week. In spite of these trends, China’s power production from coal and gas dropped 5% in September, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air’s Lauri Myllivirta, contributing to a 1.2% drop for the first nine months of the year.
Sixty years after the Thames was declared biologically dead due to years of pollution, the Zoological Society of London has found that the river is revived. Hundreds of wildlife species have returned to London’s central waterway, including seahorses, eels, seals, and shark species with charmingly English names like tope, starry smooth hound, and spurdog sharks.
The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.