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The EV transition is facing a reality check. Can the planet afford it?
Once, it seemed like a major coup d’etat in the global war on carbon emissions: The United Kingdom, even under the conservative leadership of Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the time, announced in 2020 that it was 10 years away from banning the sale of new diesel and gasoline cars. In other words, any new cars sold in 2030 and beyond — and 1.6 million of them were purchased last year — would need to be zero-emission vehicles, likely electric cars but also some hydrogen cars as well.
Fast forward a bit to a year that’s seen more uneven EV adoption than many anticipated, a situation exacerbated by a shaky post-pandemic global economy. Now, the British government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hits reverse: Did we say 2030? Oh, we mean 2035 instead.
Sunak announced this week that the UK will, in his words, “ease the transition to electric vehicles,” allowing sales of new internal combustion cars until 2035. His decision is a disappointing one for climate reasons and, allegedly, even for some automakers hinging big hopes and potentially trillions of dollars on transitioning to EVs. (More on that later.) But the bigger question is, is this rollback just the start of a bigger trend?
Unfortunately, it probably is. Because what we’re finding with EVs is that saying you’re going to do something is a lot easier than actually doing it.
Sunak’s decision quickly outraged scientists and green groups, especially since it came during Climate Week, a time when leaders from all over the world (including Prince William) gathered in New York to discuss how to mitigate the greatest crisis of our lifetimes. It even angered some drivers in the U.K., according to The Guardian; people who were counting on a more robust used EV market and now worry about a slower rollout for public charging.
Transparently, I’m no expert on the U.K.’s climate politics. My own country gives me plenty of headaches on that front, thanks very much. But Sunak’s points aren’t entirely unreasonable here. He blames the high cost of EVs and fears an effectively all-electric new car market will put an undue financial burden on ordinary people already squeezed by inflation, high energy costs, and an uncertain economy. “We seem to have defaulted to an approach which will impose unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families,” Sunak said in his speech this week. And he’s not wrong; as is the case in the U.S., EVs are still considerably more expensive than internal combustion cars, and Britain has its challenges with a woefully inadequate and unreliable charging infrastructure.
I’ll also give Sunak, who like Johnson is a conservative, some credit for actually admitting that climate change is an existential problem. “No one can watch the floods in Libya or the extreme heat in Europe this summer, and doubt that it is real and happening,” he said in his remarks this week, while touting Britain’s gains in reducing carbon and fighting pollution. That’s more than we get here in America, where our conservatives can barely admit that human-driven global warming is real — let alone say we need to do anything about it. (The bar is extraordinarily low over here!) Finally, Sunak is also not entirely off-course when he says the 2035 target aligns with what Germany, Canada, Sweden, and U.S. states like New York and California are planning too.
But that’s about as magnanimous as I’m willing to be here with Sunak’s arbitrary-seeming decision. It’s extremely unclear what Sunak expects to happen by giving this an extra five years, except further delay solving some of the very problems he describes here; after all, more EVs on the road and more EV production in Britain (thanks to increased demand) will lower prices the same as any consumer product, and push the charging infrastructure forward, too. Any improvements on those fronts just lost a sense of urgency that could’ve made them happen sooner.
Then there’s the domino effect problem. At worst, this move could provide ammunition for those governments — and car companies, and energy providers, and anyone else crucial to this transition — to slow-walk a move to zero-emission transportation.
If the U.K. can move its target date back, why wouldn’t Germany, which is also fretting about what this shift means for its ultra-important car industry? Why wouldn’t New York or California, which are struggling in similar ways with high costs of living, housing affordability, and the challenge of building out vast and reliable charging networks? (Yes, even California isn’t good enough there yet.)
And is five years “enough” to stave off intense EV competition from China? What does “enough” even mean in that context? Moving the targets, as Sunak has done, feels like a step away from what was once such an ambitious move for the United Kingdom — a country that, in spite of all of these challenges, is seeing fast and record EV growth this year; it could be as high as 23% of the market in 2024, about twice what America’s tracking for. It’s making progress on the electric front, so why kneecap that progress now?
Then there are the automakers themselves; the phrase “trust, but verify” always comes to mind when I hear about their commitments to going all-electric. Not all of them are setting firm dates to swear off internal combustion. But most, if not all, are making aggressive and enormous investments into EVs and battery plants; any delays or uneven regulations could throw a wrench into those plans, leading them to invest a ton of money into cars people may not want to buy.
Some of them even hit back at Sunak’s decision, including officials from Kia and Volkswagen; "Our business needs three things from the U.K. government: ambition, commitment, and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three," Ford U.K. Chair Lisa Brankin said. It could also be equally troublesome for the U.K.’s perpetually beleaguered auto industry. Just last week, Mini’s parent company BMW announced a major investment to make the brand fully electric and keep production British instead of Chinese — all by 2030, too. Mini’s future finally seemed secure after years of uncertainty between Brexit and the decline of small car sales; now it gets hit by a curve ball (or whatever soccer, cricket or rugby equivalent fits best) from its own government that will torpedo demand for all those new EVs for years to come.
At the same time, many automakers are hedging their bets here too, even if they won’t admit it openly. Ultimately, their duty is to shareholders, not the planet. In the U.S., Ford is dialing back some of its aggressive EV targets and focusing a little more on hybrid cars amid uneven electric adoption and production troubles this year. General Motors has committed to going all-electric eventually, but it’s also coming out with a new gasoline V8 to power its next generation of big trucks and SUVs, which drive basically all of its profits. (They’re not even hybrid engines.) And other automakers would rather rely on a network of parts suppliers, factories and dealers they’ve set up over a century to sell gas cars than make an electric pivot they won’t all survive.
In other words, give them an excuse — say, pushing back internal combustion bans — and they may not do it at all. I could easily see a reality where a car company like GM, which has committed to going all-electric by 2035, says it’s going to be 2040 now. And then 2045. And then, “Look at all these efficient gasoline cars we have now!” or “But have you seen the new Escalade? We’re throwing in the air filtration system as standard — massaging seats, too!” Like I said: trust, but verify.
In short, I fear the British government’s decision this week will lead other governments and their leaders to dial back some of their most aggressive climate commitments, even if they take this challenge more seriously than much of America does. It’s like a crack in a dam: It sometimes starts with just a few small ones right before the flood happens. After all, even the ultra-tough European Union left the door open to internal combustion sales past 2035, provided they run on deeply unproven “e-fuels.”
Sunak is right when he says this will be a difficult transition to zero-emission cars — which will almost certainly be EVs and not other types of vehicles in the near term. It’s hard and expensive. The automakers probably also hate it, deep down, because it’s hard and expensive. And no one should believe the world can “fix” climate change with EVs, especially when they’re $60,000 SUVs.
But moving to zero-emission cars is about laying the long-term groundwork for a world where automotive transportation creates vastly less pollution than it does now. For the United Kingdom, that goal just moved five more years down the road. Let’s hope it doesn’t move any further.
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Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary had an easy go of it.
With Donald Trump due to take office in less than a week and a Republican Congress already sworn in, much of the Biden administration’s effort to advance clean and especially renewable energy is now in doubt. The fate of the Inflation Reduction Act is likely to be a major flashpoint — and yet the confirmation hearing for Chris Wright, a literal fracking executive, for Secretary of Energy proved to be relatively low-key and collegial among senators from both parties.
Here are three takeaways from the day’s proceedings:
Wright is not one of Trump’s more controversial nominees, so it’s no surprise that his hearing went smoothly — and that Wright was introduced by his fellow Coloradan, Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper, was an early strong signal that will likely pass through confirmation with ease. To the extent there were any fireworks, they came not from the legislators on the dais but rather from several quickly muffled protests in the hearing room. One protester shouted, “I'm 18 years old and I want a future!" before being removed, while another one yelled, “Will your fracking liquid put out fires in L.A.?”
The questioning before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources was a mix of parochial concerns from senators about their own states — the committee’s ranking Democrat, Martin Heinrich, for instance, asked if Wright would visit Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, located in his home state of New Mexico, while Pennsylvania Senator David McCormick, a Republican, asked about the prospects of a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Pennsylvania.
That’s not to say climate change didn’t come up. Wright repeatedly avowed that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons, although he demurred that it was a “global” problem and turned his responses repeatedly to developing energy resources in the United States.
“If you shut down industry, those emissions don’t go away, they go somewhere else,” Wright claimed. “The only pathway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve quality of life is energy innovation.”
Wright generally stayed away from specifics on spending levels or individual programs, aside from expressing generalized enthusiasm for the Department of Energy’s network of national laboratories and the importance of its work maintaining the nuclear stockpile. In his opening statement, he identified one of his goals as to “unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore energy dominance.”
Over the course of the hearing, what he meant became at least marginally clearer. Under questioning from McCormick about the Department’s Office of Fossil Energy — renamed the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management under outgoing President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm — Wright lamented that fossil fuel had “fallen out of fashion and out of favor. There’s less interest in investing in it and less interest in talking about it,” he said, before declaring, “I don’t share that aversion.”
He did, however, expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal (“It’s an enormous, abundant energy resource below our feet”) and nuclear power. He also went along with Democratic senators who asked about reforms to existing federal permitting regulations to facilitate the buildout of long-distance energy transmission, a focus of the last Congress’s failed permitting reform bill and a key precursor to cleaning up the grid. (Nuclear and geothermal are also two areas where Wright’s company, Liberty Energy, has investments.)
To the extent Wright was willing to talk about solar — there was barely any mention of wind in the entire hearing — he had to be prodded by Democrats in sun-rich states, such as Heinrich and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto. Wright also called into question some estimates of how cheap renewables are, arguing that a popular measure for comparing energy resources with each other, the levelized cost of energy, “misses the boat on electricity generation because it’s like, would you take Uber that was 10% cheaper in cost if you didn’t know when the Uber would pick you up or where it would drop you off?” essentially arguing that the low price of energy generated by renewables doesn’t take into account their unavailability during certain times of day or in certain weather conditions.
Wright’s relatively easy reception reflects the fact that there actually are wide areas of bipartisan agreement on the kind of energy research and technology development work the Department of Energy does. Members on both sides of the aisle saw their enthusiasm for nuclear power — especially small modular reactors — reflected back by Wright, with Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego saying “I appreciate your enthusiasm for nuclear energy.”
The Energy and Natural Resources Committee is also stocked with Senators who represent states where the DOE has a substantial presence, including New Mexico, California, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Washington, which can lead to more collegial hearings if the nominee, as Wright does, affirms the importance and value of the Department’s national laboratories. Agencies that spend money broadly across the country tend to be popular with lawmakers.
But Wright is just the first nominee for a major energy and environment related post to face the Senate. Other nominees, including Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior and Lee Zeldin for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, may endure more contentious hearings, as they will likely face questions on issues that are sharply divisive, like opening up public lands for fossil fuel extraction and rules on power plant and tailpipe emissions.
The nonprofit uses a mixture of public data and algorithmic magic to unleash funds fast.
Whether they’re dealing with fires like the ones ravaging Los Angeles or hurricanes like those that wreaked havoc in Florida and North Carolina just a few months ago, when natural disasters lay waste to homes and towns, what low-income residents often need most is quick cash. That, however, can be difficult to come by. Insurance companies can take months or even years to fully resolve claims. The Federal Emergency Management Agency requires significant documentation before it will offer relief, and often denies victims with no explanation.
The nonprofit GiveDirectly is trying to circumvent all this maddening complexity, working with Google to overlay government data on things like median income and food stamp enrollment with damage data gleaned from satellite imagery and local incident reports to get cash in the hands of those who need it most — quickly. After a disaster, low-income residents in especially hard-hit areas are automatically deemed eligible for aid, no opt-in necessary. They’ll get a notification on their phone that they qualify for a direct cash transfer, and can enroll in a matter of minutes, with no additional documentation required.
“Especially as disasters become more prevalent and more severe, having a way to pre-verify vulnerable populations — to get people resources as quickly as possible — becomes so valuable,” Laura Keen, GiveDirectly’s U.S. program director, told me. As she explained, cash is often more useful than “in kind” donations such as clothing or food, as it allows recipients to prioritize specific needs and reduces barriers associated with government-run disaster programs. “You have to have the means and the know-how and the language abilities to apply for that assistance,” Keen said. Still, over 75% of global humanitarian assistance is in-kind.
GiveDirectly set up its fundraising campaign for L.A. fire victims on January 10, and is thus far over 40% of the way to its $1 million dollar goal. While the fundraiser won’t officially close for another 25 days, Keen said the organization plans to send out its first payments “as soon as next week.” While GiveDirectly has yet to finalize amounts, it estimates that recipients will get on the order of $3,000 to $4,000 — significantly more than the nonprofit gave to victims of Hurricane Ian in 2022 or Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year. That’s because with these fires, “the damage has been so severe, and we expect people are going to be facing temporary housing costs for a matter of months,” Keen explained. For a campaign like this, Keen said she expects about 88 cents out of every dollar donated to go directly to affected individuals and families, the same efficiency rate as the organization’s Helene and Milton campaign. That remaining 12 cents will go towards transaction fees, offices, and staff.
If these rapid payouts remind you of parametric insurance, you’re on the right track. Parametric insurance also exists to get cash quickly into the hands of those who have experienced disaster, without the need for damage audits. But as is implied by the word “insurance,” it is also an opt-in service that involves the payment of monthly premiums. GiveDirectly’s cash comes out of the blue, free and clear.
To get the actual money out the door, GiveDirectly works with Propel, an app for low-income households to manage government benefits such as SNAP food stamps. GiveDirectly tells Propel what areas its mapping tool has honed in on, and Propel sends out an alert to users in these zones, notifying them that they’re eligible to receive money. Individuals then complete a brief survey confirming their contact information, preferred language, and signing some consent notices.
“The last response that we did in western North Carolina and in Florida last fall, it took them, on average, 68 seconds to complete that enrollment form,” Keen told me. The last time she looked at the data, there were about 2,300 households using Propel in the impacted areas of L.A., a number that’s only growing as the largest fires remain uncontained. Once people enroll, they can expect to receive money directly to their debit accounts within three days.
While quick and simple, this strategy is far from comprehensive. Only about one in four households that receive SNAP benefits has the Propel app. And those that do may not open it regularly, meaning they could miss the alert that they qualify for cash. For Propel users who see the notification, Keen said, enrollment is above 80%, while overall user enrollment is much lower — around 40%. “But typically, we have more Propel users than we have funds,” Keen explained. Basically, it wouldn’t actually be possible to give the target amounts to everyone who meets the criteria. Rather, the strategy is to get money out as quickly as possible, knowing full well there'll be many who are missed. Plus, relying on Propel makes the whole system safe from fraud (something GiveDirectly has dealt with in the past), as Propel users have already verified their eligibility for government benefits. “So we just have very high confidence in who we're supporting,” Keen told me.
Domestic disaster relief was not initially on the agenda for GiveDirectly, which was started in 2008 by a group of econ grad students at Harvard and MIT as a way to get money into the hands of some of the poorest people in the developing world. Since the organization began accepting public donations in 2011, it’s mostly retained this international focus, making its first foray into domestic cash transfers in 2017, when it provided physical debit cards to victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas.
“At that time, we had pretty rudimentary targeting,” Keen told me. “We would just drive to different areas, talk with as many people as we could, visually look for signs of damage, try to source any open source information where we could, and then overlay that with administrative data.” Since then, the company has integrated artificial intelligence into its hurricane relief efforts, training algorithms to generate damage assessments for thousands or even millions of structures. But fire damage is much more uniform (if a house burns, it’s usually 100% destroyed) and easy to identify from satellite imagery alone, Keen explained.
If GiveDirectly exceeds its fundraising target in L.A., however, it may run out of eligible residents who are reachable via the Propel app, meaning the organization will need to go back to basics: establish an in-person presence in the city., enroll people onsite, and hand out debit cards once more. “Right now our goal is to get to $1 million, and then all of that we can deliver via Propel,” Keen told me. “But if we exceed that, we would definitely explore other options.”
On rumors from fossil fuel insiders, the LA wind forecast, and Davos
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms brought transportation chaos to Sydney and left 120,000 homes without power • Greece may resort to filling hotel pools with seawater instead of fresh water due to extreme drought • A clipper storm will bring some snow to the Great Lakes and parts of Appalachia today and tomorrow.
Winds in fire-ravaged Los Angeles were weaker than expected yesterday, but are forecast to pick up again today as firefighters continue to battle ongoing blazes. The National Weather Service issued another “particularly dangerous situation” warning indicating extreme red flag fire weather in large parts of LA until 3 p.m. Wednesday. The Palisades fire is just 18% contained, and the Eaton fire is 35% contained. Some 88,000 people are under evacuation orders, and the death toll has reached 25. Conditions are expected to ease tomorrow, but another round of Santa Ana winds could emerge next week, the NWS said.
National Weather Service
Lobbyists for the oil and gas industry widely believe President-elect Donald Trump will issue a suite of executive orders targeting energy policy shortly after his inauguration. According toThe Wall Street Journal, Trump is expected to “instruct agencies to begin unwinding President Biden’s limits on drilling offshore and on federal land.” Other moves to watch for include:
Trump’s team has apparently discussed his plans with energy industry insiders, but these are not set in stone. “Energy clearly was on the ballot, and we’re going to make the case that energy won,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the Journal.
President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, is scheduled for his Senate confirmation hearing today at 10 a.m. EST. He will face questions from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Democrats had asked the panel’s chairman, Republican Sen. Mike Lee, to postpone the hearing due to missing paperwork from the Office of Government Ethics that includes financial disclosures. Lee postponed the hearing for Trump’s pick for interior secretary, Doug Burgum, for a similar reason. Wright is currently the CEO for fracking powerhouse Liberty Energy. The Sierra Club called him a “climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.”
The World Economic Forum put out its annual report of global risks ahead of next week’s summit in Davos. Extreme weather events, which were at the top of the list last year, moved down a notch into the second position, below armed conflict. Twenty-three percent of the 900 or so expert respondents ranked state-based armed conflict as the number one risk facing the globe in 2025, whereas 14% chose extreme weather events:
WEF
Last year, 66% of respondents ranked extreme weather as the top risk, and 53% chose AI-generated misinformation. Looking ahead over the next 10 years, the climate crisis looms very large: Experts ranked extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to Earth systems, and natural resource shortages as the top risks facing the globe through 2035. The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting runs from January 20 - 25. President-elect Trump is expected to give a virtual address on the 23rd.
A group of more than 150 Nobel laureates composed an open letter calling on governments to support the development of “moonshot” innovations to avert a looming hunger crisis. The letter warns some 700 million people are already going hungry, and the problem will only worsen as the population grows. The global food shortage has many causes, but the letter cites climate change as a major challenge and calls for “planet-friendly” technologies to boost food production. “We know that agricultural research and innovation can be a powerful lever, not only for food and nutrition security, but also improved health, livelihoods, and economic development,” said Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate and outgoing U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security. “We need to channel our best scientific efforts into reversing our current trajectory, or today’s crisis will become tomorrow’s catastrophe.”
Global EV sales were up by 25% last year compared to 2023, according to research group Rho Motion. In the U.S. and Canada, sales rose by 9%, compared to a 40% jump in China.