You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
An arcane tax policy is about to reshape America’s energy economy.
How do you prove your electricity is clean? This deceptively simple question is at the heart of an all-out war raging among environmental groups, academics, and energy companies over a new tax credit for the production of clean hydrogen.
At stake, most immediately, is billions of dollars in subsidies and the success and integrity of a nascent climate solution. But the question is so foundational to the energy transition that the answer could also reverberate through the U.S. economy for decades to come. And by a fluke — or by the limitations of the current political system — Janet Yellen’s Treasury Department has been tasked with setting the precedent.
“This is not just a hydrogen debate, at its very core,” Nathan Iyer, a senior associate at the clean energy research nonprofit RMI, told me. “This is the first round of a much larger, era-defining question.”
Get one great climate story in your inbox every day:
To see why, it’s crucial to understand what all the hydrogen hubbub is about in the first place.
Hydrogen is a key plank in the Biden administration’s climate strategy, as it has the potential to replace fossil fuels in a number of industries, including steelmaking, shipping, aviation, and fertilizer production. But today, most hydrogen is made from natural gas in a carbon-intensive process, so first it has to become cheaper to make it in cleaner ways.
The Treasury Department got involved because the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed last summer, created a generous tax credit to make these other, cleaner ways of producing hydrogen more competitive. One method, called electrolysis, involves splitting hydrogen off of water molecules using electricity. The process is emissions-free, as long as the electricity comes from a carbon-free source. Companies will be able to earn up to $3 for every kilogram of hydrogen produced this way. But before anyone can claim the credit, the Treasury has to write rules for what counts as clean electricity.
This is a more fraught question than it might sound. If a hydrogen plant wants to use power from the electric grid rather than build its own, dedicated supply, there’s no easy way to trace where the electrons it’s using originated. And the grid is still largely fed by fossil fuels.
The solution is to allow grid-connected projects to “book” clean energy by signing contracts with wind or solar or geothermal plants that serve the grid, and then “claim” the use of that energy to the Treasury. Many industries voluntarily use these sort of “book and claim” deals in order to advertise to customers that they are “powered by clean energy.”
But one influential Princeton study found that hydrogen production from electrolysis is so energy-intensive that in order to be sure that it has a low carbon footprint, these deals should follow three guidelines: The “booked” clean energy should be generated locally, from a recently-built power plant, and matched to the hydrogen facility’s operations on an hourly basis. Otherwise, you might have a hydrogen plant in New Mexico “buying” energy from a wind farm in Texas that’s already been operating for half a decade. Or you might have that same plant buy lots of local solar power, but then keep operating at night. In either case, a natural gas plant will likely have to ramp up to meet the real-time energy demand.
Without these guardrails, the authors warn, the Treasury could end up directing billions of taxpayer dollars to facilities that emit twice as much carbon as those making hydrogen from natural gas today.
Many hydrogen companies want the Treasury to instead adopt more of an “A for effort” kind of approach. They argue that the point of the tax credit is to launch a new industry, and that onerous rules could kill it before it has a chance to get off the ground.
In fact, there’s so much money on the line that the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Industry Association has been flooding the public with ads in newspapers and on streaming and podcast services delivering a cryptic warning that “additionality” — the requirement to buy energy from new power plants — was threatening to “set America back.” Others, like the energy company NextEra, are lobbying against the hourly requirement.
While companies tussle with environmental groups and others over what’s at stake for hydrogen, the Treasury’s decision will have implications far beyond any one project, company, or even industry. That’s because the emissions risks described in the Princeton paper are not unique to clean hydrogen.
Automotive, paper and pulp, and food and beverage are just a few examples of other industries with large energy needs that use heat from natural gas boilers but could eventually switch to industrial electric heat pumps or thermal batteries. There are also emerging technologies that hardly exist yet, like machines that remove carbon from the atmosphere, that could be essential to curbing climate change, but will consume lots of electricity.
If we don’t decarbonize the grid in tandem, these solutions could do more harm than good. But whether or not it should be the responsibility of individual companies to do that is a question that will keep coming up. Unlike Europe, the U.S. has no national renewable energy standard or other policy working in the background, forcing the grid to get greener over time no matter how much electricity demand grows.
Legacy industries are unlikely to switch to electricity voluntarily, let alone build clean power sources while they do it. These shifts will require subsidies that make them profitable or regulations that obligate them. And designing those subsidies and regulations will require making the same call that the Treasury is being asked to make right now.
“In that broader sense, these clean hydrogen rules are a real opportunity,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “It's important to get this right.”
The decision could also have international trade implications. Europe has already finalized its own rules for what constitutes clean hydrogen, and they essentially mirror the three guidelines recommended by the Princeton paper, but phase them in to give companies time to figure out how to comply. A weaker set of rules in the U.S. could tarnish the reputation of U.S. hydrogen in global markets.
“We are going to want to have a single global market,” said Jason Grumet, the CEO of the trade group American Clean Power during a panel on Monday about the tax credit debate. His organization wants the Treasury to adopt similar rules to Europe, but phase them in much more slowly. He argued that some companies would still choose to follow Europe’s timeline in order to have access to that market.
The market in question is not just a market for clean hydrogen, per se. The stuff isn’t an end in itself but a building block for decarbonizing a wide range of other products: clean steel, carbon-free fertilizer, replacements for jet fuel, to name a few.
That won’t just matter for exports to Europe, but business opportunities at home. The Biden administration’s “Buy Clean” initiative requires the government to prioritize buying “low-carbon, made in America construction materials.” But if the foundation of these “clean” products is built on faulty carbon accounting it could undermine the whole program.
“Over time, there will be increasing incentives to use low-carbon materials and products because of policies like Buy Clean,” said Rebecca Dell, senior director of the industry program at the Climateworks Foundation. “But the further down the supply chain you go, the harder it is to enforce regulations on the inputs and processes at the top. So it’s worth getting [the hydrogen tax credit] right on its own merits.”
The tax credit rules could also set off a negative feedback loop within the power sector itself. The Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed new regulations to reduce emissions from power plants, including the option to let them burn a blend of natural gas and hydrogen. But if making hydrogen requires burning a lot of natural gas in the first place, the benefits could cancel out.
A senior spokesperson for the Treasury did not respond to a question about whether the department was considering any of these broader implications in devising the rules, instead replying that it was “engaging with a range of stakeholders, the Department of Energy, and other federal partners” and “focused on providing clarity to businesses as soon as possible and ensuring this incentive advances the goals of increasing energy security and combating climate change.”
Wagner, of Columbia, compared the situation to the federal renewable fuel standard, a subsidy for ethanol that Congress created ostensibly to reduce emissions from transportation. But recent analyses have found the policy has done more harm than good for the climate. Nonetheless, the EPA recently re-upped the policy for three more years. Once a policy is in place, it’s pretty hard to tighten it later, Wagner told me.
“What we are trying to do by getting the rules for clean hydrogen right from the beginning is to avoid a reckoning later.”
Read more about hydrogen:
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.
How Hurricane Helene is still putting the Southeast at risk.
Less than two months after Hurricane Helene cut a historically devastating course up into the southeastern U.S. from Florida’s Big Bend, drenching a wide swath of states with 20 trillion gallons of rainfall in just five days, experts are warning of another potential threat. The National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast of fire-risk conditions for the coming months has the footprint of Helene highlighted in red, with the heightened concern stretching into the new year.
While the flip from intense precipitation to wildfire warnings might seem strange, experts say it speaks to the weather whiplash we’re now seeing regularly. “What we expect from climate change is this layering of weather extremes creating really dangerous situations,” Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, explained to me.
Scheuller said North Carolina had been experiencing drought conditions early in the year, followed by intense rain leading up to Helene’s landfall. Then it went dry again — according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state was back to some level of drought condition as of mid-November. The NIFC forecast report says the same is true for much of the region, including Florida, despite its having been hit by Hurricane Milton soon after Helene.
That dryness is a particular concern due to the amount of debris left in Helene’s wake — another major risk factor for fire. The storm’s winds, which reached more than 100 miles per hour in some areas, wreaked havoc on millions of acres of forested land. In North Carolina alone, the state’s Forest Service estimates over 820,000 acres of timberland were damaged.
“When you have a catastrophic storm like [Helene], all of the stuff that was standing upright — your trees — they might be snapped off or blown over,” fire ecologist David Godwin told me. “All of a sudden, that material is now on the forest floor, and so you have a really tremendous rearrangement of the fuels and the vegetation within ecosystems that can change the dynamics of how fire behaves in those sites.”
Godwin is the director of the Southern Fire Exchange for the University of Florida, a program that connects wildland firefighters, prescribed burners, and natural resources managers across the Southeast with fire science and tools. He says the Southeast sees frequent, unplanned fires, but that active ecosystem management helps keep the fires that do spark from becoming conflagrations. But an increase like this in fallen or dead vegetation — what Godwin refers to as fire “fuel” — can take this risk to the next level, particularly as it dries out.
Godwin offered an example from another storm, 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which rapidly intensified before making landfall in Northern Florida and continuing inland, similar to Hurricane Helene. In its aftermath, there was a 10-fold increase in the amount of fuel on the ground, with 72 million tons of timber damaged in Florida. Three years later, the Bertha Swamp Road Fire filled the storm’s Florida footprint with flames, which consumed more than 30,000 acres filled with dried out forest fuel. One Florida official called the wildfire the “ghost” of Michael, nodding to the overlap of the impacted areas and speaking to the environmental threat the storm posed even years later.
Not only does this fuel increase the risk of fire, it changes the character of the fires that do ignite, Godwin said. Given ample ground fuel, flame lengths can grow longer, allowing them to burn higher into the canopy. That’s why people setting prescribed fires will take steps like raking leaf piles, which helps keep the fire intensity low.
These fires can also produce more smoke, Godwin said, which can mix with the mountainous fog in the region to deadly effect. According to the NIFC, mountainous areas incurred the most damage from Helene, not only due to downed vegetation, but also because of “washed out roads and trails” and “slope destabilization” from the winds and rain. If there is a fire in these areas, all these factors will also make it more challenging for firefighters to address it, the report adds.
In addition to the natural debris fire experts worry about, Helene caused extensive damage to the built environment, wrecking homes, businesses, and other infrastructure. Try imagining four-and-a-half football fields stacked 10 feet tall with debris — that’s what officials have removed so far just in Asheville, North Carolina. In Florida’s Treasure Island, there were piles 50 feet high of assorted scrap materials. Officials have warned that some common household items, such as the lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and electric vehicles, can be particularly flammable after exposure to floodwaters. They are also advising against burning debris as a means of managing it due to all the compounding risks.
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department in North Carolina, told Blueridge Public Radio that his department’s work has “grown exponentially since the storm.” While cooler, wetter winter weather could offer some relief, Scheuller said the area will likely see heightened fire behavior for years after the storm, particularly if the swings between particularly wet and particularly dry periods continue.
Part of the challenge moving forward, then, is to find ways to mitigate risk on this now-hazardous terrain. For homeowners, that might mean exercising caution when dealing with debris and considering wildfire risk as part of rebuilding plans, particularly in more wooded areas. On a larger forest management scale, this means prioritizing safe debris collection and finding ways to continue the practice of prescribed burns, which are utilized more in the Southeast than in any other U.S. region. Without focused mitigation efforts, Godwin told me the area’s overall fire outlook would be much different.
“We would have a really big wildfire issue,” he said, “perhaps even bigger than what we might see in parts of the West.”