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On getting corporate buy-in, affordable EVs, and the return of the Chevy Bolt
I spoke with Kristen Siemen, General Motors’ chief sustainability officer, as her fellow Michiganders were reeling from another late summer day of violent thunderstorms, extreme summer heat, tornado and hail warnings, school closings, and damaging wind gusts that left 365,000 homes and businesses without power.
In the race against climate change, Siemen feels the pressure for GM to reach its goal to be carbon neutral in its products and operations by 2040, despite lowering its production target for electric vehicles this year to 200,000 to 250,000 vehicles (down from 200,000 to 300,000) and backtracking on its plans to produce a million EVs next year. The 31-year GM veteran started her career as an engineer.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How bad was last night?
I was texting all night and into this morning, checking in on my staff and whether they have power at their homes and whether we’re able to operate our facilities. Unfortunately, these big storms are happening more and more frequently and it’s getting harder for our grid to reliably and consistently provide energy for all of the things we're trying to do. And this isn’t just a U.S. problem.
How worried are you about the idea that there’s a slowdown in EV sales?
There’s no doubt that the acceleration has not happened as quickly as was predicted. But that doesn't mean that the EV segment isn’t growing. It’s still a huge growth opportunity. We've got a lot of products covering a lot of segments that weren't available before, everything from the affordable Equinox EV to full-size trucks with the Silverado and a luxury vehicle with the Cadillac Lyric. And obviously the supertruck Hummer.
Which new EV model do you think will do the best?
I have two favorites and I've driven them all. I actually was in the Cadillac Lyric for quite a while, and it’s, by far, the best vehicle I've ever driven, based on performance and luxury features. Just absolutely loved the product.
And then the Equinox EV. To get a family sized SUV that starts at $35,000 and you add in the tax incentives, you're talking under $30,000 for an EV for a family. That’s a game changer, to be able to have something that's affordable. It's a fantastic product with incredible range, great performance, and all the features that you can imagine. These are the things that will really open the doors for people that maybe couldn't or weren't considering an EV in the past.
What else do you worry about?
I worry about the stability of our country's infrastructure, particularly the grid. We need to more reliably and consistently provide energy for all of the things we're trying to do to make the energy transition a reality. And we have a long way to go.
What about a lack of EV charging infrastructure?
If you go on a long road trip and you drive through areas that don't have public EV charging stations, it's a little unnerving. People need to see more charging stations in their daily lives — like we’re used to seeing a gas station on every corner. The more people that can see that EV charging stations are readily available, even though they probably will use one rarely, they just want to know it's there. It gives that sense of comfort that it's available. And charging at home isn’t feasible for everybody, particularly in urban areas. So it's going to be important to see that our customers see more charging infrastructure when they are out and about.
How are you feeling about Plug-In Hybrids (PHEVs)?
As long as consumers have concerns over the charging infrastructure, PHEVs are going to help bridge that gap for customers that either aren't ready or aren't able to make the full transition to an EV. But from a chief sustainability officer’s perspective, the only way we get to zero is by charging with green energy. And so we want that transition to happen as quickly as it possibly can.
What did GM learn from its Bolt experience and what do you expect from the new Bolt due out in late 2025?
The Bolt was a terrific product. And the customer base was extremely passionate, extremely loyal, and probably the highest customer satisfaction score of some vehicles ever, not just at GM. So for the new Bolt, we're going to build on that equity and that passion that we've had and do it as efficiently as possible.
We really needed to transition, and that's what we're doing. The new Bolt EV will be on the new Ultium battery platform, and so it'll be profitable and an affordable EV. We heard a lot from Bolt customers and that passion is certainly something that drives us.
Any advice for all the sustainability executives out here who are having a hard time getting traction within their companies?
When I first got the phone call to take this role, my first question was, why me? You know, I don't have a sustainability background, I’m not sure what I can contribute.
But in reality, knowing the business has been a huge advantage to be able to communicate and understand all the challenges to being a chief sustainability officer. I know how long it takes to put a product into production. I know all of the things that an engineer needs to balance around cost and quality and performance.
So I tell other CSOs to meet [their C-suite colleagues and stakeholders] where they're at. Talk to the CEO about how making the company more sustainable means making the company more resilient and stronger for the future, ensuring that we have a positive impact on the world. Educate the CFO on how all this saves money. When you look at the things we’re doing from an environmental or health and safety standpoint, they're just good for people. It's about doing the right thing. So it doesn't even have to be a debate over climate change, right?
How does that dynamic work within GM?
Saving energy, saving water, those save costs. And there isn't anybody who disagrees with saving costs.
Now, there are some things that we may want to do today, but we just can't justify it. Some of our largest challenges are in our assembly plants, around things like heating and cooling and with our paint ovens. Even if we had the capital, or wanted to allocate the capital, to make those transitions today to electric, it really doesn't make sense in every case, because natural gas is really cheap.
And so we need to focus instead on, how do we make what we do more efficient? How do we use less resources? How do we continue to make our manufacturing processes more efficient and make sure that we're allocating our resources, our capital, our investments in the places that we can make the biggest impact today? And then prepare ourselves for when this transition is more readily available.
What other companies do you admire for their work in sustainability?
One of the things I love about this job is really the collaboration. The CSO space is a very friendly space. We're all trying to work on the same issues, right? It's a very unique situation where you all have the same challenges, regardless of what your company does, and so it's extremely collaborative.
There are a lot of companies just doing incredible work in sustainability. I’ve spent time recently with the CSO of Colgate-Palmolive and one of their big wins this year was developing a recyclable toothpaste tube. What’s really cool about their story is that they made [their IP] available for everyone. We've also had conversations with Nike and Lululemon around materials. It’s a good opportunity for us to come up with solutions together. And we’re working with the tech companies too, Google, Amazon, Microsoft.
Partnering with NGOs has also been helpful, working on everything from how to purchase renewable energy, including virtual power plants, and how you take advantage of all those EVs out there that can help generate power for days like today when so many people have lost power.
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Helene’s winds stretch close to 500 miles across. That’s half the width of the entire Gulf of Mexico.
When Hurricane Helene began to take shape in the Gulf of Mexico, there was one factor that quickly made the storm stand out to meteorologists: its size. Helene is “unusually large,” the National Hurricane Center said; “exceptionally large,” per the Washington Post. Upon landfall, it was one of largest hurricanes in modern history, according to hurricane expert Michael Lowry — bigger than Harvey, bigger than Katrina, surpassed only by 2017’s Hurricane Irma, which was one of the costliest tropical storms on record and resulted in dozens of deaths.
Bigger does not always correlate to stronger. Discussions around the strength of a hurricane typically center on its wind speeds (which is what the categories connote) and the volume of rain it is expected to unleash. But in Helene’s case, there was both size and power — when the storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region late Thursday night, it was classified as a Category 4 storm, with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 61 of the state’s 67 counties ahead of the storm, speaking to the breadth of damage he expects to see and the long recovery process to come. Already, images of flooded streets are circulating on social media, multiple deaths have been reported, and millions are without electricity. As Helene continues its course, it’s bringing tropical storm conditions to Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee.
In the hours and days to come, we’ll get a better understanding of how well forecasters did predicting the path and strength of this storm, a task that has become increasingly difficult. Because at the same time technology has improved oversight of these storms, with artificial intelligence models that have raised the bar for prediction accuracy and the ability to deploy radar systems as they pass overhead, climate change is altering the ingredients that feed their formation. For example, record-high temperatures in oceans have changed the behavior of storms as they form, Matt Lanza, who monitors Atlantic storm activity for The Eyewall, explained to me, resulting in more storms intensifying rapidly ahead of landfall. This has made storms like 2023’s Hurricane Idalia tougher to predict, despite being closely tracked.
Helene, too, rapidly intensified on its way to reaching land. The area of Florida where it hit, a little over 50 miles from the state capital in Tallahassee, is no stranger to storms— in just the past 13 months, Florida’s Big Bend has had to absorb the impacts of both Idalia and Hurricane Debby, each of which caused billions of dollars in damages. Still, Truchelut said Hurricane Helene could be a “truly unprecedented scenario for North Florida.” Part of the unusual force behind this storm can be attributed to another unprecedented scenario — the warmth of the water in the Gulf of Mexico. CBS News said the water surface temperature below the storm’s formation was up to 89 degrees Fahrenheit, which is as much as 4 degrees above average. This follows the overall Gulf warming trend observed by NOAA, which the agency says “increases the intensity of hurricanes.”
Another factor that allowed Helene to grow so huge so fast was the lack of wind shear, a term meteorologists use to refer to the way wind changes speed or direction or both across different elevations. Strong upper-level winds can inhibit storms from forming or growing. In Helene’s case, however, warm water was accompanied by low wind shear and plenty of moisture— conditions that aligned to provide tremendous energy for the storm’s formation. The only thing really standing in Helene’s way was its own size, Lanza noted, which would have made it more difficult for the storm to get organized and strengthen further.
The most obvious reason size matters is the footprint the storm will have on land. To give you an idea of just how large Helene is, Lowry said in his newsletter Friday that the full breadth of its winds upon landfall stretched over 450 miles across, nearly half the entire width of the Gulf of Mexico. This means the effects of the storm began long before it officially made landfall and will continue long after the eye of the storm has moved on.
Hours before Helene officially reached Florida, rain was already drenching communities in the storm’s projected path. Meanwhile, “Severe and life-threatening impacts from Helene will occur hundreds of miles from the cone confines, especially on the eastern half of the storm,” Florida meteorologist Ryan Truchelut wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat, summing up just how far-reaching Helene’s effects could be. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a self-described “rare news release” on Wednesday to warn of the potential for major flooding as far inland as Appalachia, some 300 miles from the Gulf Coast.
Another serious size-related consideration relates to the potential storm surge, or how far above average tides the water will rise. “When you have a storm this big, you're just inherently moving a lot of water over a broader area,” Lanza said. As Hurricane Helene’s eye approached Florida, water levels easily surpassed multiple storm surge records. But what stood out to Lanza was not just that the surge was powerful, it was also that the threat of surge was so widespread. “A much smaller storm, you can still have a very large storm surge, but it's going to be very isolated near to where it comes ashore,” he told me. “With a storm like Helene, because of its size, near and east of where it comes ashore, you're going to have a massive storm surge — and you're going to have a pretty big storm surge even down the coast from that.” The NHC warned that much of Florida’s Western coastline would see multiple feet of water.
Messaging the risks of these storms to an extreme weather-weary public is another challenge stemming from climate change. “Record breaking” has now become a familiar phrase for most of us, describing everything from extreme temperatures to rainfall rates. But as tropical storms become more intense, fueled by warming-influenced weather conditions, finding ways to accurately convey threats to the public is increasingly essential.
Ahead of Helene’s landfall, the NHC stressed that the storm surge would be “unsurvivable,” encouraging residents to heed evacuation orders. According to The New York Times, the warnings — paired with memories of those other recent storms — seemed to have worked, leaving Big Bend-area towns “eerily empty”. Even the local Waffle House, a business widely recognized for making its own assessments of hurricane risk, was shuttered on Thursday.
The NHC is experimenting with new graphics in hopes of better conveying risks outside of the classic “cone of uncertainty,” which illustrates the predicted path of a tropical storm’s eye. The center shared an image on social media showing inland risks from storms, not just those along the coast.
So if you noticed the NHC’s risk map for Hurricane Helene colored the entire state in a palette of watches and warnings, the reason why is twofold: Yes, the risks really are that widespread with this storm, but the agency is also trying to get better at telling you about them. And in the case of major hurricane like Helene, the more warning, the better.
On the storm’s next moves, electrifying oil and gas rigs, and risky real estate
Current conditions: Parts of England could be hit by tornadoes today • Another hurricane is churning in the Atlantic • The border between Switzerland and Italy has to be moved because of rapidly melting glaciers.
Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region last night as a Category 4 storm with top sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. The extent of the damage from the storm so far is unclear, but several locations saw record storm surge, including nearly 10 feet in Ceder Key and 6.3 feet in St. Petersburg. At least three people are known to have been killed, and more than 1.2 million Floridians are without power. “We’re fearing the worst when the sun comes up,” said the sheriff’s office in Suwannee County. “We’re gonna need some prayers folks.”
NOAA
One hurricane scientist said Helene is one of the largest storms on record to strike the Gulf Coast, with its winds covering an area of about 420 miles. The storm’s size means its effects will be felt in cities far north of the coast, even as it weakens. As of Friday morning it had been downgraded to a tropical storm. In Georgia, more than 900,000 are without power. Tornado warnings were issued for parts of South Carolina, with additional tornado watches in effect in Georgia and North Carolina. A quarter of oil production and about 20% of gas output in the Gulf was shut down because of the storm.
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is under pressure to clarify her position on natural gas. “We need more details,” said Dave Callahan, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition. Harris has reiterated that she is not against fracking, and has called for investing in “diverse sources of energy,” but hasn’t said much more on the issue yet. President Biden paused approvals for new liquified natural gas export terminals while the Energy Department studied their climate effects, a move that angered the industry but pleased climate activists who say the terminals lock in greenhouse gas pollution for decades to come. A judge has since blocked the freeze, but new approvals remain slow. Pennsylvania is a major natural gas producing state, and a must-win battleground for the 2024 election. Republican candidate Donald Trump has promised to lift the permitting freeze if elected in November.
Texas yesterday approved a plan to expand grid infrastructure in the Permian Basin, the largest oilfield in the U.S., to make sure the basin’s oil and gas facilities have reliable electricity. Last month Permian Basin Petroleum Association Executive vice president Stephen Robertson said access to electricity was the industry’s biggest concern for the basin, where power demand is expected to balloon over the next 15 years as the oil and gas industry electrifies operations.
The International Energy Agency estimates that oil and gas operations account for around 15% of global energy-related emissions. It calls for a 50% reduction in emissions intensity for those operations by the end of the decade to align with a planway toward net zero by 2050, and electrification is one step on that path. But the IEA notes that “tackling methane emissions is the single most important measure that contributes to the overall fall in emissions from oil and gas operations.” Recent data suggests U.S. producers – including those in the Permian Basin – continue to emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, at rates much higher than current EPA estimates and industry targets.
The United Arab Emirates is expected to outline its new national climate plan – known more formally as a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) – ahead of the upcoming COP29 climate summit in November. “That would make it one of the first major emitters to take that step ahead of the February 2025 deadline,” Reutersnoted. Under the Paris Agreement, party nations are required to submit new and updated NDCs every five years, outlining their plans to reduce emissions in line with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The upcoming deadline for new NDCs is February 2025, but Sultan Al Jaber, president of last year's COP, said the UAE hopes to set an example for other countries to submit their plans asap. Previous NDCs from major fossil fuel producing nations did not mention oil, coal, and gas, so it will be interesting to see if or how the new plans grapple with the stated COP28 goal of “transitioning away” from fossil fuels.
A recent report from the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore and S&P Global warned that the real estate sector could see climate change-related losses of more than $500 billion by 2050. It added that “climate adaptation solutions for non-residential real estate like green or cool roofs and wet or dry floodproofing present investment opportunities.” Last year, the U.S. experienced 28 weather and climate disasters, and together they cost more than $92 billion.
Relatedly, yesterday the online real estate marketplace Zillow said it will start including properties’ climate risks in sale listings, using data from climate research and technology company First Street. Prospective buyers will be able to see flood, fire, wind, heat, and air quality risks, along with insurance requirements and tailored recommendations. More than 80% of home buyers are factoring climate risk into their decisions now, First Street said. The climate risk information will be available on the Zillow website by the end of the year (rolling out on the Zillow apps this year or early 2025).
Zillow/First Street
“I just want to be clear that building the clean energy future that we want and need is not a rhetorical flourish. It means actual construction.” –Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, speaking with Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer about how fighting climate change will mean building a new economy. Read their entire conversation here.
“We have to make deals now.”
Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii is one of the Senate’s climate hawks. Or — really — if you listen to his colleague, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, he’s one of the Senate’s “three climateers,” a group of relatively young (he’s 51) and relatively progressive Democratic senators from solidly blue states.
He’s also no fan of Republicans. You can check his account on the social network X (née Twitter), where he has written tens of thousands of posts, for confirmation of that.
But speaking with me in New York earlier this week, Schatz argued that the next stage of progress on climate change will require compromising with the opposing party. Democrats can make it easier to build and run nuclear power plants, enhanced geothermal wells, and long-distance transmission, he said, and those goals will be easiest to accomplish if they do it with Republicans.
“Until and unless we both have a trifecta and eliminate the filibuster, we are going to have to have a negotiation with people with whom we have pretty serious disagreements,” he told me.
Not that he’s endorsing a permitting reform bill. (He hasn’t yet gotten behind a compromise proposal from Senator Joe Manchin, an independent of West Virginia, and Senator John Barrasso, a Republican of Wyoming, although he called it a “serious effort.”) But he does want progressives — and especially old-school environmentalists — to understand that fighting climate change will mean building a new economy. “I just want to be clear that building the clean energy future that we want and need is not a rhetorical flourish,” he told me. “It means actual construction.”
Schatz is also co-chair of the Senate Climate Change Task Force and the Democratic caucus’s deputy whip. We recently sat down on the sidelines of New York Climate Week, where he met with climate investors, the UN Secretary General, and diplomats from small Pacific island nations. We discussed permitting reform, the 2024 election, and the next major Democratic climate bill — a so-called “Inflation Reduction Act 2.0” — might look like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When I see the phrase “IRA 2.0,” I think, wow, they’d be really lucky to get an IRA 2.0.
But we were really lucky to get a 1.0.
That’s right. So what would go into an IRA 2.0 as you’re thinking about it — under a presumed Harris administration here, right?
I have a bit of caution here, only because I think we did it so carefully last time, both on the policy side, but also in terms of building a coalition for the bill. As much as we think we know what the next step is, we still have to start over and do listening to Native communities, to labor, to environmental justice communities, to the traditional environmental organizations, to finance, to critical minerals. We have to go and canvass the universe of stakeholders, and start by listening rather than dropping a bill as a fait accompli.
So we’re in the beginning stages of that process. The only thing I’m attached to is [that] it should be as big as the first bill, and that we need to remain focused on emissions reductions as the first, second, and third priority.
Are there particular aspects of the first bill that now, several years later, you think, if we had another knock, we’d do it a little differently?
No, because I think that presumes that I had the pen. Nobody exactly had the pen. The pen was passed around, so it was all about the art of the possible. It was this very well constructed but — by necessity — heterogeneous thing, and I imagine it would be the same way again because we’re gonna have to get to 51 in the Senate and a majority in the House, as well. I do think there is a ton of progress to be made on nuclear. I think there’s a ton of progress to be made in enhanced geothermal. And obviously everybody’s well aware of what we need to do, um, in terms of [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s] authority and transmission.
My own instinct is that the transmission stuff and the permitting reform stuff is not an IRA 2.0 play. I think we have at least a punter’s chance of getting it done this year, so I would not punt that to ‘only if we win the trifecta.’
How are you thinking about the Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform proposal? Senator Heinrich has endorsed it. There’s some trepidation among the traditional greens that it’s going to get worse via the House before passage, but it does tackle, in a bipartisan way, a lot of the stuff you were just citing — nuclear, geothermal, advanced geothermal. How are you weighing these different forces?
I think it’s a serious effort. And I think that on the transmission side, it would accomplish a lot. I think a lot of the folks who are opposed to this just don’t like the idea of compromising with John Barrasso.
And fair enough. John and I do not have a ton of common ground as it relates to energy policy, but until and unless we both have a trifecta and eliminate the filibuster, we are going to have to have a negotiation with people with whom we have pretty serious disagreements.
The way I always analyze these bills — from the ITC and PTC extension that was paired with the lifting of the oil export ban [in 2015], to the IRA, to the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] — is I let the science and the analysis tell me whether it’s a net positive. And it is preliminary data now from these modeling shops, but it’s encouraging.
Look, it’s a planetary emergency, and we are in the business of trying to build the clean energy future that we want and need. I just want to be clear that building the clean energy future that we want and need is not a rhetorical flourish — it means actual construction. And for someone who got his start in the environmental world, trying to prevent things from being built because I care about the planet, there has to be a shift in mindset towards building big things at scale. Otherwise, we’re going to fry our planet.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain places that are ecologically or culturally so significant that they should be left alone. But the problem is that a lot of the laws that we have, don’t simply protect our sacred places. They prevent wind farms from being built in parking lots. So I just think the environmental movement has to understand and internalize: Oh my goodness, this is an emergency. How fast can we go?
When I’ve talked to traditional greens about this, they don’t disagree that these laws are blocking stuff that we want to get built. They say, sure, but that the result of any negotiation with Republicans will produce a law that will result in worse outcomes.
Well, then I guess we’ll just twiddle our thumbs until the revolution comes. I’m serious. What are we gonna do?
There are some people who don’t want to enact anything because it’s within a capitalist model. Well, it seems to me that that conversation can be a very brief one, because we are in a capitalist model and we’re not going to allow the planet to burn while we wait for a different economic system.
And there are those who are imagining that at some point we’re gonna have 60 unreconstructed progressives [in the Senate] and a Democratic president, and boy, that sounds great. But my job is to make sure we enact laws to keep us on track towards avoiding climate catastrophe, and that means we have to make deals now.
How are you feeling about the 2024 election?
I don’t trust happiness, so I don’t know how I feel. But obviously our Senate candidates are holding up reasonably well. There are some tough ones — we have some really viable challengers now in Florida and Texas. I’m feeling optimistic, but not overly so.
Do you think the IRA survives a Republican trifecta?
I do. I do. I think there’s just too much money at stake, in too many red and blue states, that I would have a hard time seeing them repealing the thing. I think they might try to take a pound of flesh that is mostly symbolic in nature. But I think the foundation of the technology-neutral tax credits is not just unlikely to be repealed, but unlikely to be modified.