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How Republicans and Democrats came together to seed new industries in specific places
The Biden administration announced on Friday that it would spend up to $7 billion to create seven new “hydrogen hubs” across the country. These hubs will house large-scale industrial facilities specializing in producing, moving, and using hydrogen, a potent gas that could play a range of roles in a climate-friendly economy. Hydrogen, which does not emit carbon pollution when burned, could decarbonize long-distance trucking, energy storage, chemical making, and heavy industry.
These hubs will, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo writes, become important public-private laboratories for the use of clean hydrogen. They will complement tens of billions of dollars in tax credits that could soon support a clean hydrogen industry.
Although these hubs are a key part of the president’s climate strategy, they are not created by his signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. They were funded, instead, by the bipartisan infrastructure law, which passed in December 2021.
That same legislation also spent $3.5 billion to create new direct air capture hubs, big regional facilities that will deploy technology capable of sucking carbon dioxide from the ambient air. In August, the Energy Department awarded the first of those hubs to Texas and Louisiana.
It matters that these two “hub”-based programs command some measure of bipartisan support. It signals, first, that these programs are likely to endure even if the GOP takes the White House next year. It shows, too, that Republicans in Congress — and especially in the Senate, where 19 Republicans voted for the infrastructure law — can back climate policy under some conditions. (Even if those conditions might involve having to negotiate with a Democratic president.)
It certainly helps, too, that hydrogen and direct air capture are two potentially climate-friendly industries where the fossil fuel industry could play the largest role. The chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, a fossil-fuel company that is building one of the first air-capture hubs, has even argued that carbon removal technology could allow the oil and gas industry to operate for decades to come.
But the bipartisan support for these programs reveal something else, too — a deeper change in how America’s leaders think about governing and growing the economy. Most coverage of the hubs has elided the fact that they’re called “hubs,” almost treating the word “hub” as a synonym for “big new economic thing.” But the hubs are called “hubs” for a reason; don’t snub the hubness of the hubs. The hubs are meant to do more than create new experimental industrial facilities at taxpayer expense. They are meant to seed specific industries in specific places, creating new centers of gravity that will allow new regional economies to form.
The idea behind the hubs goes back more than a decade. In 2010, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked around the U.S. economy and realized something strange: Although many of the world’s most innovative and profitable companies did their R&D, design, and distribution in America, very few of them made their products here. Think of Apple, for instance, whose iPhones then bore the inscription: “Designed in California. Assembled in China.”
Why was that?, the team asked. That arrangement distorted the economy, depriving working-class people of the benefits of new industries. It also seemed unsustainable. “Without production capabilities in the U.S., can we generate new growth and jobs?” asked Suzanne Berger, a political science professor who led the project. “Can we even sustain innovation without manufacturing capabilities in the U.S.?”
The U.S. could not go on like this forever, they concluded, because innovation in design was inseparable from innovation in production. Many industries — including biotech, material science, and clean energy — required engineers to constantly flit back and forth from the factory floor to the lab, bringing problems encountered by assembly technicians back to the design engineers.
But this tight circuit of design, production, and design again didn’t just happen within influential companies, like Ford, AT&T, and 3M. One takeaway from their report, Making in America, is that innovation emerges from skilled communities of practice located in specific places. When a big company opens a factory or R&D lab somewhere, an ecosystem grows up around it. Small- and medium-sized manufacturers with their own expertise cluster around that big firm, because they can make a living by selling their own goods and services to that firm (or its competitors).
Speaking to a Senate committee in 2013, Berger described what happened when her team visited the laboratory of Tonio Buonassisi, a mechanical engineer then building a new type of solar cell. Buonassisi’s lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was full of cutting-edge equipment that had been made by an instrument company located only a couple hours away.
“Much of [that] machinery had been made in close collaboration between the lab and the instrument companies as they handed ideas and components and prototypes back and forth,” Berger said. “Used for the first time in the lab, these tools were now being marketed to commercial solar companies.”
At the time, the domestic solar industry was collapsing, and it worried Buonassisi. If American solar-cell makers went out of business, then it would put his specialty toolmaker out of business, too — and slow down or possibly end his own research agenda. “Even in a fragmented global economy with instant connection over the Internet to anywhere in the world,” Berger said, the close geographic ties “that connect research in its earliest stages to production in its final phases remain vital.”
When you start looking, you see endless evidence of these ecologies of production, these skilled communities of practice, everywhere. Silicon Valley once earned its name because it housed a booming semiconductor manufacturing industry nurtured by the Defense Department. A chip conductor at Intel could access a specialty lens maker, or metallurgist, or chemicals maker only a short drive away; even outside of work, these people met at bars and socialized in the same places. Soon, that semiconductor ecosystem gave rise to other adjacent businesses: a software industry that could write code for those semiconductors, and a personal computing industry that could make semiconductors useful to mass-market consumers; those industries gave rise to today’s tech industry.
Nor was that region’s power solely rooted in its technicians. The banks near Silicon Valley grew so familiar with the hardware and software industries that they could finance companies there more easily and cheaply than other financial institutions. One of those institutions even named itself after Silicon Valley.
Today, America has relatively few of these innovative clusters left. The point of the hub-based strategy is to build them back. The idea of the hubs isn’t only that America will get seven new large-scale facilities that produce or process hydrogen, or four new facilities that suck carbon out of the air. The object is that these big facilities will anchor new skilled communities of practice, the same way that, say, a deep-sea volcanic vent gives rise to an entire colorful food chain. President Biden might be announcing a new Philadelphia-based hydrogen hub today, but we won’t know if that hub will be a success until it’s scuttling with metallurgists and chemists and financiers and specialty electricians in 10 years.
The hydrogen and direct air capture facilities, in other words, are meant to grow into true hubs — hubs of engineering, hubs of finance, hubs of innovation. The government, having recognized that new industries and industrial centers will not form naturally, is now trying to seed them intentionally.
That is far from the laissez faire approach to innovation once embraced by policymakers. And it matters that Democrats and Republicans alike have embraced it in the infrastructure law: It reveals the growing belief that free markets alone will not keep America at the top of the global economy. Today’s announcement might be the first time you hear about a new federally supported “hub.” It probably won’t be the last.
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A federal appeals court on Tuesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to kill former President Biden’s $20 billion green bank program, which would have provided low-cost loans for solar installations, building efficiency upgrades, and other local efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The three-judge panel overturned a lower court’s injunction temporarily requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to resume payments, and ruled that most of the plaintiffs’ claims were contract disputes and belonged in the Court of Federal Claims. If the case now moves to the Court of Federal Claims, the plaintiffs would only be able to sue for damages and any possibility of reinstating the grants would be gone. But they could also petition to appeal the decision.
Congress created the grants, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It authorized Biden’s EPA to award $20 billion to a handful of nonprofits that would then offer financing to individuals and organizations for emission-reduction projects, mostly geared toward low-income or otherwise disadvantaged communities. The agency fully obligated the funds last August to eight nonprofits that would “create a national financing network for clean energy and climate solutions across the country.”
Then Trump took office and ordered his agency heads to pause and review all funding for Inflation Reduction Act programs. EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin targeted the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program for termination, making a big show of a covert recording of a former agency employee comparing Biden’s efforts to get climate money out the door after the election to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic. Nevermind that this particular program had been fully obligated prior to the election, and recipients had already started to announce investments as early as October.
The nonprofit awardees sued the Trump administration, and the District Court for the District of Columbia issued a temporary injunction on the EPA’s grant terminations in mid-April, mandating that the funds continue to be paid out while the case proceeded. The EPA appealed that injunction, leading to today’s ruling.
In her opinion for the majority, appeals court Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, dismissed the nonprofits’ claims that the EPA’s grant terminations were arbitrary and capricious, in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. She wrote that the dispute was “essentially contractual” and therefore did not belong in the district court to begin with. The nonprofits had also alleged that the EPA violated the constitution's separation of powers in attempting to cancel the grant agreements, as Congress had given explicit direction to the agency to award the funds by September 2024. While Judge Rao allowed that the district court had jurisdiction over this particular claim, she ruled that it was “unlikely to succeed” on the merits.
This decision, if it stands, means the case is basically over, David Super, an administrative law expert at Georgetown Law, told me. The plaintiffs could ask to have it transferred to the Court of Federal Claims if they wish to pursue monetary damages, but that’s likely a losing proposition since Judge Rao — unusually, according to Super — went on to opine that the plaintiffs would have no case there, either.
The plaintiffs could, however, ask for a rehearing by the full D.C. circuit. “Given that this is a very important case, both legally and practically, I think they would have a good chance of getting reheard,” Super said.
There was one other important point in the decision. While this case has been playing out, Congress rescinded any “unobligated” funding — money that hasn’t yet been spent or contracted out — from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund as part of Trump’s tax and spending law. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the remaining balance in the fund was just $19 million, essentially the cost of program administration. But the Trump administration has argued in the ongoing court case that the law rescinded the full $20 billion. Judge Rao disagreed, writing that the law “did not render this appeal moot.”
This is the latest in a series of wins for the Trump administration over the termination of grant funding. Last week, the D.C. district court dismissed a challenge brought by nonprofits over the termination of the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grants, another Inflation Reduction Act program, on the grounds that it belonged in the Court of Federal Claims. The Supreme Court also issued a similar opinion in August regarding grant funding from the National Institutes of Health that was terminated on the grounds of a shift in agency priorities.
The evaporation of $20 billion in clean energy funding is no small loss, but Super said the consequences could also be much more systemic, threatening the viability of federal grantmaking as a tool to stimulate private capital. “If these commitments are utterly unenforceable, then no one's going to do business with the federal government,” he said.
On uranium challenges, Cadillac’s EV dreams, and a firefighter’s firestorm
Current conditions: Atlantic hurricane season enters its peak window and a zone west of Africa is under close monitoring for high risk tropical storm development this week • A polar air mass came down from Canada and dropped temperatures 15 degrees below historical averages in the Great Plains and the Northeastern U.S. • Croatia braces for floods as up to 11 inches of rain falls on the Balkans.
Add the Department of Transportation to the list of federal agencies waging what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind.” The Transportation Department said Friday it was eliminating or withdrawing $679 million in federal funding for 12 projects across the country designed to buttress development of offshore turbines. The funding included $427 million awarded last year for upgrading a marine terminal in Humboldt County, California, meant to be used for building and launching floating wind turbines. The list also included a $48 million offshore wind port on Staten Island, $39 million for a port near Norfolk, Virginia, and $20 million for a staging terminal in Paulsboro, New Jersey. “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a statement. “Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg bent over backwards to use transportation dollars for their Green New Scam agenda while ignoring the dire needs of our shipbuilding industry.”
It’s just the Trump administration’s latest attack on wind. The Department of the Interior has led the charge, launching a witch hunt against any policies perceived to favor wind power, de-designating millions of acres of federal waters for offshore wind development, and kicking off an investigation into bird deaths near turbines. Last month, the Department of Commerce joined the effort, teeing up future tariffs with its own probe into whether imported turbines pose a national security threat to the U.S. In response, the Democratic governors of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey on Monday issued a statement calling on the administration “to uphold all offshore wind permits already granted and allow these projects to be constructed.”
Only a tiny percentage of plastic waste is recycled.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
In what the New York Times called a “sharp escalation” of its legal strategy to fend off liability for pollution, Exxon Mobil has countersued California, accusing the state’s landmark litigation over plastic waste of defaming the oil giant. At a court hearing last month, Exxon attorney Michael P. Cash described the lawsuit California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a cadre of environmental groups first filed last year as “an attack” aimed at the oil company’s home state of Texas and said the issue should be litigated there. As Times reporter Karen Zraick noted, Cash illustrated his point by displaying “a graphic showing a missile aimed at Texas from California” and by comparing Bonta and his nonprofit allies to “The Sopranos.”
Backed by a parallel lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, and the Surfrider Foundation, Bonta sued Exxon in state court on the grounds that the company had deceived Californians by “promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis,” alleging that the pollution had created a public nuisance and sought damages worth “multiple billions of dollars.” The lawsuit mirrors past litigation over planet-heating emissions, but targets the petrochemical division that has been one of the fastest-growing for Exxon and other oil giants. The courtroom drama came right as international negotiations in Geneva over a global treaty to curb plastic pollution failed after the United States joined Russia and other petrostates to block measures supported by more than 100 other nations that would have curbed production.
In North America, nuclear fuel may soon become harder to come by. Canadian uranium giant Cameco has warned that delays in ramping up production at its McArthur River mine in Saskatchewan could shrink its forecast output for the year. The move came just a week after one of the world’s other major suppliers of uranium, Kazakhstan’s state-owned miner Kazatomprom, announced plans to slash its production by 10% next year.
The pullback is happening right as the U.S. nuclear industry’s dealmaking boom is taking off. Now that Trump’s tax law assured that support for atomic energy would continue, Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that more reactor plans are coming. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told Katie. That includes Europe. Despite similarly lethargic construction of reactors over the last three decades, France and Germany have finally united around the need for more atomic energy to power the continent’s energy transition. A pact signed at last week’s Franco-German summit “appears to herald rapprochement on reactors,” the trade publication NucNet surmised.
Once a stodgy gas-guzzling automaker, Cadillac refashioned itself as a luxury electric vehicle maker in recent years, rising alongside Chevrolet to put General Motors in the No. 2 slot behind Tesla. Roughly 70% of buyers who purchased the electric versions of the Cadillac Optiq or Lyriq switched from other luxury brands, including 10% who previously owned Tesla. That number could rise with Tesla’s brand loyalty nosediving, as this newsletter previously reported. “We’re in a position of great momentum,” John Roth, the global vice president of Cadillac, told The New York Times. “We offer more electric S.U.V.s than any luxury manufacturer, all with more than 300 miles of driving range.” But as Times reporter Lawrence Ulrich wrote, “that moment will soon be tested” as the electric car industry reels from the repeal of tax credits in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
The challenges ahead are best illustrated through the Escalade, Cadillac’s iconic luxury SUV. The company sold just 3,800 electric Escalade IQs in the first six months of the year. While that’s a strong showing for a three-row SUV starting around $130,000, the V-8 engine gas-powered Escalade starts at about $87,000, and sold about 24,000 vehicles – roughly six times as many as the electric version.
Lawyers in Oregon are demanding the release of a firefighter arrested last week by Border Patrol while fighting a wildfire in Washington state. The man, whose name hasn’t been released, was among two firefighters cuffed in the Olympic National Forest as they fought to contain the Bear Gulch Fire that had burned about 14 square miles as of Friday and forced evacuations. The arrests sparked a political firestorm over what critics saw as a jarring example of the warped priorities of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. That’s particularly so in the case of this firefighter, who attorneys said had received his U-Visa certification from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon in 2017 and had submitted his U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services application the following year.
When the AP asked the Bureau of Land Management why its contracts with two firefighting companies were terminated and 42 firefighters were escorted away from Washington’s largest wildfire, the agency declined to comment. The decisions came as the American West is essentially a tinderbox. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported, Washington and Oregon are both at high risk of a megafire igniting this fall.
Turns out mammoths weren’t just in the icy tundra. Scientists in Mexico discovered mammoth bones, shedding light on a once-obscure population of extinct tropical elephantids that ranged as far south as Costa Rica. In a paper published this week in Science, National Autonomous University of Mexico paleogenomicist Federico Sánchez Quinto documented the previously unknown lineage of the Santa Lucía mammoths, which he said split from northern Columbian mammoths hundreds of thousands of years ago. “If you had told me 5 years ago that I would be collecting these samples, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” he said. “This paper really is an exciting beginning of something.”
Toyota’s new “sweep” system will power a Mazda factory in Japan.
Toyota is helping to build Mazdas. At least, its aging car batteries are.
Cooperation between rivals is nothing new in the car world. Toyota and Subaru have teamed up to build small sports cars and electric vehicles that are, underneath the skin and the logos, essentially the same. GM and Hyundai have signed a memo of understanding to share new vehicles and clean energy tech, while Honda has used GM’s Ultium platform as the basis of its Prologue EV.
In Japan, Toyota and Mazda now say they will work together to deploy Toyota’s Sweep Energy Storage System, a way to reuse old EV batteries. The “sweep” will combine all kinds of old batteries from electric cars and hybrids into a single unit that can store energy to help power Mazda’s Hiroshima car factory. It’s a clever and promising method to give those batteries a second life, where old car parts help to create new cars.
Energy storage systems are among the most interesting answers to the question of what to do with the forthcoming flood of old EV batteries. It’s true that recycling can recover many of the precious metals therein, and a new industry has arisen to do that work. But the process remains dirty and expensive. Stationary energy storage, meanwhile, is a way to extend a battery’s useful life rather than send it to the recycling yard.
Consider a unit from an older EV that has lost half its capacity, diminishing the vehicle’s range from a healthy 250 miles to a paltry 125. That would be an impractically small distance between charges for many drivers, but it doesn’t mean the battery is cooked. It takes a lot of energy to push a car that weighs several thousand pounds, so that old unit still can store plenty of kilowatt-hours for purposes other than propulsion.
Storage systems can use batteries, old or new, to save surplus solar energy during the day to be used overnight, or to stash backup energy that could be fed onto the grid to avoid blackouts in times of shortage. This application gives older batteries a less labor-intensive way to remain useful in their retirement years. The batteries can be daisy-chained together so that even older units with diminished performance can create ample energy storage.
At Mazda’s Hiroshima factory, Toyota’s system connects to 1,500 megawatts of solar capacity installed on the roof — the only power generation system in Japan run by a car company. The sweep battery, currently in a testing phase to see whether it can interface seamlessly with the plant, would help balance out the supply and demand of the renewable energy coming from upstairs.
The real key to Toyota’s system is its versatility. Most battery backup systems, like Tesla’s Powerwall, use identical batteries in the creation of a whole, which cuts down the electrical complexity. The sweep system, however, can use a mishmash of batteries from different vehicles with different capacities or battery chemistries. The technique that gives the “sweep” system its name is the software’s ability to sweep across all the batteries in the series and turn the power supply from any of them off and on within microseconds in order to control the energy output of the whole system.
It matters not whether the units came from a new all-electric car or an old Toyota Prius hybrid. Whether they are lithium-ion, nickel-metal-hydride, or lead-acid makes no difference. As CarBuzz explains, it’s as if you could combine all the extra batteries in your junk drawer and all the half-used ones around the house to seamlessly create one big unit that taps into all their energy. Even old batteries salvaged from car accidents can be used if the batteries themselves are undamaged. Toyota says it integrates the old batteries’ original inverters (the devices that transform DC into AC power) into the system, negating the need to build a new one for the system as a whole.
The giant automaker has already proven the sweep concept: In 2022, it built a sweep system for the Japanese energy giant Jera that, with its battery powers combined, could store more than 1,200 kilowatt-hours. (For a comparison, the battery in the long-range version of the current Tesla Model Y can store 75 kilowatt-hours, while the average American home uses about 900 kilowatt-hours per month.)
Toyota will need to prove that the sweep can scale up to the level of a car factory, and larger. If it can, then it’s a promising way for yesterday’s batteries to help stabilize and manage the green energy of tomorrow. Not bad for a geriatric power pack.