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Our deliver-everything era is crashing into a hotter planet.
When my phone dinged with the delivery notification, I raced outside to get the package into my apartment. I was not afraid of parcel theft, but of the sauna-like temps outside. One of 2023’s unbearable summer heat waves had descended upon Los Angeles, and my wife’s package of cosmetics contained creams and solutions with very specific instructions about how they should be safely stored. They weren’t the kinds of things you want to leave out in the sun as the thermometer approaches 100.
This year’s record-setting temperatures come at a time when Americans have fully embraced the power of online shopping. We have just about everything delivered — not just the durable goods that have always been sent through the mail, but perishable items like makeup, medicine, and meal prep kits. That adds up to a lot of extra deliveries happening during the dog days of a climate-changed summer.
The first thing to worry about are the men and women in the trucks. While office workers can turn up the air conditioning to mitigate extreme summer temperatures, delivery drivers spend their sweltering days getting in and out of vehicles that may or may not have AC. This summer, a U.S Postal Service letter carrier in Texas died while working on a day with a heat index in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Media reports have found drivers from parcel services like UPS and FedEx who say they suffer heat exhaustion from working in a truck with only a small fan to keep them cool, or are afraid to spend too much time in the vehicle’s unventilated cargo hold on a hot day.
Those organizations are now making changes to counter the increasingly dangerous summers. UPS reached a deal with its union to put AC in new trucks bought after January 1, 2024, and to retrofit old ones with solutions such as heat shields. In some areas, USPS has considered changing its delivery schedule, allowing drivers to start earlier in the morning to beat the afternoon heat.
These changes should help to protect drivers. But what about their deliveries? Packages sent during summer spend plenty of time in hot distribution centers and in the blistering backs of trucks where drivers fear to tread. If nobody’s home when the delivery comes, boxes spend hours or days in sweltering outdoors temperatures. The phenomenon has led to many social media conversations in which users ask one another whether their boxes full of delicate fragrances or HelloFresh meal prep kits are still safe to use or eat after long exposure to this insufferable summer.
Meal kits are shipped in temperature-controlled packaging meant to endure a day or two outside, with insulation and cold packs in place to keep food from warming up in transit and spoiling before it ever gets in the fridge. Abigail Dreher, the associate director of corporate communications for HelloFresh, told me that the company already optimizes how temperature-resistant it makes its packaging based on climate. Somebody receiving the ingredients to make golden chicken schnitzel in Tucson, Arizona will have their food packaged with more cold-keeping power than someone who, say, orders a kit for chicken wings in Buffalo.
As summer temperatures around the nation rise, though, shippers will need to use more and more insulating materials. “We test for temperatures up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit,” Dreher says, “and every year we plan for a 3-degree Fahrenheit average increase in temperatures, which increases the amount of cold-packaging going to hot destinations used year over year.” So far, however, HelloFresh has been able to offset this increase in packaging by using less insulation for meal kits bound for colder places.
That’s good news for sustainability, because while many insulating layers used for shipping are curbside-recyclable, some must be thrown away — including those gel packs used to keep shipments cold. “We are continuously searching for biodegradable/compostable alternatives to our gel packs,” Dreher says. “However, we do not yet have a solution that can be sourced at the scale which we need.”
The same trend goes for not only food but any contents that must be temperature-controlled. Medication, says GoodRx, “can change physically or chemically” when moved or stored in extreme temperatures. Medicines like insulin that must stay cool come in cold packaging, and many temperature-sensitive drugs are shipped with color-changing test strips or some other safeguard meant to tell the recipient whether the contents have been exposed to extreme temps.
The most likely outcome is that more shoppers will be caught in no-man's land upon opening their packages. If that meal kit delivery has sat under the sun for hours — and the steak inside is still cool, thanks to the packaging, but maybe not as cold as it once was — should you still cook and eat it? If that box of medicines endured a day in the 100-degree heat, but doesn’t look any different, should you take them, or send them back? A sea of judgment calls await.
Another possibility: higher shipping costs. Merchants who sell heat-sensitive products already have a variety of temperature controlled shipping options at their disposal, from specialized hardy containers to keep cargo at room temperature or colder to real-time temperature monitoring to “cold chain centers” to keep items cool while they await distribution. In addition, sellers may be tempted to choose faster shipping options to minimize the in-transit exposure to summer temperatures — costs that, no doubt, will be passed on to the home shopper.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.