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Economy

New England Will Soon Be Coal-Free

On shuttered coal plants, New York’s congestion charge, and Volvo’s last diesel car

New England Will Soon Be Coal-Free
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Flood watches are in effect for the eastern half of North Carolina • Egg-sized hail smashed car windshields in eastern China • Europe is forecast to be unusually warm through April.

THE TOP FIVE

1. New England to shutter last remaining coal plant

New England will soon follow the Pacific Northwest in becoming a coal-free region. Granite Shore Power, which owns the region’s last-remaining coal plant, said it will close Merrimack Station in Bow, New Hampshire, by 2028 at the latest. The move is voluntary, but is part of a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency over the facility’s excessive particulate matter emissions. Granite Shore Power says it will transform the plant, as well as Schiller Station in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, into a “renewable energy park.” “The end of coal in New Hampshire, and for the New England region as a whole, is now certain and in sight,” said a statement issued by Tom Irwin, the vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation in New Hampshire. “Now we must vigorously push for the phaseout of other polluting fuels like oil and gas.” New Hampshire will be the 16th state to go coal free.

2. Louisiana to get direct air capture hub

The Department of Energy is giving the green light to Project Cypress, a cluster of facilities in southwest Louisiana that will filter carbon dioxide directly from the air and store it underground. The agency will award the project $50 million for the next phase of its development, which will be matched by $51 million in private investment. But there is a long road ahead: The project’s four implementation phases will take several years, and members of the surrounding community near Lake Charles (home to some of the most contested energy projects in the country) are skeptical the project will benefit them. Once it’s fully operational, Project Cypress is designed to capture 1 million tons of carbon from the air per year. Louisiana alone releases more than 200 million tons annually. “Even if we scale this up, we'd have to scale it up orders of magnitude higher than will ever be possible,” one Louisiana activist told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo.

3. New York’s MTA paves the way for congestion pricing

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has approved a plan to start charging drivers $15 for entering Manhattan below 60th Street, “the most congested district in the United States.” The congestion charge is expected to result in 100,000 fewer cars entering that region every day, reducing gridlock and improving air quality. Research shows that low-emission zones and congestion charging zones, which have been rolled out in other cities across the world, are associated with health benefits, including lower rates of cardiovascular disease.

MTA

New York would be the first city in the United States to implement such a program, but the plan faces challenges from six lawsuits that need to be settled before it can go ahead. “I’m keeping my champagne on ice until the lawsuits are resolved (which stopped a version in 1980) and no acts of Congress passed to block it (which stopped tolls on East and Harlem river bridges in 1977) and the first car is charged,” traffic analyst Sam Schwartz toldGothamist.

4. Biden administration finalizes crackdown on methane from oil and gas

The Biden administration finalized a rule yesterday requiring oil and gas companies to reduce methane emissions from their operations. The rule “will hold oil and gas companies accountable” by tightening restrictions on gas flaring on federal lands and requiring producers to find and prevent leaks. “By setting a ceiling on how much gas companies can vent and flare without paying royalties, the new rule is expected to generate more than $50 million in additional payments to the federal government each year,” The Washington Post reported. “It will also conserve billions of cubic feet of gas that might otherwise have been vented, flared, or leaked.”

5. Volvo builds its last diesel car

Volvo

You’re looking at the last diesel car Volvo will ever make. The XC90 SUV rolled off the line at the carmaker’s plant in Torslanda, Sweden, this week, and will head straight to a museum, “where it will be on display for anyone wanting to ponder the noxious emissions of yore,” wrote Jennifer Mossalgue at Electrek.

As recently as 2016, diesel vehicles accounted for half the company’s sales. Noting the surprising speed of the EV revolution, Volvo credited “tightening regulations around tailpipe emissions, as well as customer demand in response to the climate crisis.” Volvo plans to be all-electric by 2030, “making it one of the first legacy carmakers to do so,” Mossalgue said.

THE KICKER

“The fact that we can say, ‘Look, this is slowing down the entire Earth’ seems like another way of saying that climate change is unprecedented and important.”–Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose new research suggests climate change might be affecting global timekeeping

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Politics

AM Briefing: Climate Grants Terminated

On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo

The EPA’s $20 Billion Climate Grants Have Been Terminated
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Zeldin terminates $20 billion in climate grants

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”

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Climate

What the NOAA Layoffs Are Doing to Climate Science

And how ordinary Americans will pay the price.

A hand in the NOAA logo.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

No one seems to know exactly how many employees have been laid off from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or, for that matter, what offices those employees worked at, what jobs they held, or what regions of the country will be impacted by their absence. We do know that it was a lot of people; about 10% of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at the agency have left since Donald Trump took office, either because they were among the 800 or so probationary employees to be fired late last month or because they resigned.

“I don’t have the specifics as to which offices, or how many people from specific geographic areas, but I will reiterate that every one of the six [NOAA] line offices and 11 of the staff offices — think of the General Counsel’s Office or the Legislative Affairs Office — all 11 of those staff offices have suffered terminations,” Rick Spinrad, who served as the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told reporters in a late February press call. (At least a few of the NOAA employees who were laid off have since been brought back.)

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Podcast

How Trump Has All But Halted Offshore Wind

Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap senior reporter Jael Holzman.

Offshore wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s second term has now entered its second month. His administration is doing much to slow down renewables, and everything it can to slow down offshore wind. Jael Holzman is a senior reporter at Heatmap and the author of our newsletter, “The Fight,” about local battles over renewable permitting around the country.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Jael about the bleak outlook for offshore wind, the use of presidential authority to impede energy development, and why solar has been spared — so far. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.

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