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On a unionization effort at Volkswagen, the troubles with LCA, and a Mexican election
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms and tornadoes are possible from Nebraska to Baltimore • It’s 109 degrees Fahrenheit in Vadodara, India, currently the hottest city in the world• Heavy rain is forecast for Indianapolis, but won’t dampen celebrations of #1 WNBA draft pick Caitlin Clark to the Indiana Fever.
The Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will vote this week on whether to join the United Auto Workers, a decision that labor activists say could give the union the momentum it needs for a “legitimate comeback” after its successes last fall — or, if the vote fails, take the wind out of its sails.
If successful, VW would become the only foreign commercial automaker to be unionized in the United States, and it would be the first Southern plant to unionize through an election since the 1940s, Bloomberg and The Washington Postreport. While prior efforts to unionize the Tennessee plant in 2014 and 2019 failed, the current organizing committee claims to have a supermajority heading into the vote. Local Republicans have nevertheless painted the unionization effort as “inconsistent with the people of southeast Tennessee” and as a de facto vote for President Biden, especially as former President Donald Trump has continued to bash electric vehicle manufacturing as a job killer and the UAW as a “hopeless case” on the campaign trail.
Life cycle analysis — the process of measuring all emissions related to a given product or service throughout every phase of its life — has long been the foundation of the climate economy. But in a new paper, Arizona State University climate scientist Stephanie Arcusa claims we’re “kid[ding] ourselves thinking that we’re going to have numbers that we can hang our hats on.”
Speaking with Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo, Arcusa elaborated that the impossibility of collecting all the data necessary for life cycle analysis leads us to get “so far away from reality that we can’t actually tell if something is positive or negative in the end.” As she explains:
[...It’s] almost entirely subjective, which makes one LCA incomparable to another LCA depending on the context, depending on the technology. And yes, there are some standardization efforts that have been going on for decades. But if you have a ruler, no matter how much you try, it’s not going to become a screwdriver. We’re trying to use this tool to quantify things and make them the same for comparison, and we can’t because of that subjectivity.
Former Mexico City mayor and leading Mexican presidential nominee Claudia Sheinbaum on Monday outlined a plan to invest $13.57 billion in new energy infrastructure and modernization through 2030, Reuters reports. The proposal focuses largely on increasing wind and solar generation, updating hydroelectric plants, and adding miles of new transmission lines, and notably sets her apart from current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has been criticized for pouring billions into propping up the state oil and gas company, Petroleos Mexicanos.
Sheinbaum’s proposal would not completely abandon fossil fuels, calling for new gas-burning plants as well. But she described it as “the possibility and potential to develop Mexico in a way that generates investment with well-being” and “at the same time … does not have to negatively impact the environment.” Sheinbaum said the proposal would add 13.7 gigawatts of electricity to the grid by 2030.
Mexico’s general election is June 2, and marks one of many national elections this year that put climate front and center on the ballot.
Monday marked the 31st time in 39 days that wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower topped 100% of demand on California’s grid, an event that Electrek described as a “major clean energy benchmark.”
Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson, who first shared the finding on Twitter, described it as “unprecedented in California’s history” to The Independent. Though supply did not exceed demand for the length of a full day — Jacobson looked at instances where it topped 100% from a quarter of an hour to six hours per day — it was the consistency that he described as noteworthy, pointing out that until recently, supply did not exceed demand more than a few days in a row. “This is getting so easy, it’s almost boring,” he added. “Just need offshore wind and more solar and batteries to get to 100% 24/7.”
You’ve probably already heard about the ocean’s crazy heat. However, cold water “killer events” are causing mass mortality for marine life, too, a new study published Monday in Nature has found.
The researchers report that “climate-change-driven shifts in ocean currents and pressure systems” are increasing and intensifying instances of “upwelling,” when deep, frigid water is pushed to the surface. Such events imperil migratory species like bull sharks, which attempt to avoid colder areas by swimming outside their normal routes or closer to the ocean’s surface. “You’d think they would have swum away but they got squeezed” by the upwellings, Ryan Daly, one of the authors, told The Guardian. “They couldn’t escape.”
iStock / Getty Images
150,000 years. That’s the combined amount of time New York drivers, bus passengers, and subway riders could have saved if the MTA had adopted congestion pricing back in 2008, when it was first proposed.
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The lawmakers from opposite parties discussed the Inflation Reduction Act and working together to pass legislation at Heatmap’s Energy Entrepreneurship 2025 event.
Will Republicans’ reconciliation bill successfully gut the Inflation Reduction Act?
A Democratic and Republican senator speaking last week at Heatmap’s Energy Entrepreneurship 2025 event predicted that it will not.
A proposal effectively killing the IRA “wouldn’t make it through the House,” Senator John Curtis of Utah, a Republican, said flatly at the event.
“If you believe that democracy does follow representation, those House members from those states are going to fight like hell to maintain those credits,” Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat of Colorado, agreed. He argued that 70% of the credits and benefits in Biden’s flagship climate law go to red states.
“I think you’re going to find enough Republicans push back on the value of these credits that there will be a thoughtful discussion and very careful review of each one. And as you know from the number of people that have spoken up on this, I think we’re in a good place, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be pushed and poked and prodded,” Curtis added, referencing the Republican signatories of letters sent to party leaders urging the preservation of the credits. Curtis and Hickenlooper both were optimistic about the chances of the credits surviving the budget reconciliation underway.
Consensus, not compromise, was the name of the game at Heatmap’s D.C. Climate Week event, which saw Heatmap executive editor Robinson Meyer sit down with the senators to discuss their approach to climate policy and bipartisan collaboration.
Robinson Meyer, Senator John Curtis, and Senator John Hickenlooper.Taylor Mickal Photography,
Curtis and Hickenlooper have worked together on the Co-Location Energy Act, which ensures that wind and solar projects can be developed on land already leased for other types of energy projects, and the Fix Our Forests Act, which emphasizes wildfire mitigation and forest health.
Thursday’s discussion also touched on working with the Trump administration on climate and energy policy. Curtis revealed that he spoke to all of Donald Trump’s nominees, including Chris Wright, about his work in the House on the Conservative Climate Caucus. “They all knew about it, and they all supported it,” he noted, adding that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin was a member of the Caucus when he served in the House.
“I think it's very important for me, for Coloradans, for me to have Chris Wright's cell phone number and be able to talk to him,” Hickenlooper stated, emphasizing that he’s willing to work with the Trump administration to achieve Colorado’s climate goals.
The Co-Location Energy Act was “common sense,” according to Curtis. The act was introduced back in December by himself and Congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat from California. “Two thirds of [Utah] is owned by the federal government, and if you say that’s off the table for development, that’s a huge problem,” he said.
Fix Our Forests, which passed the House in January after being introduced by Congressmen Scott Peters, a Democrat from California and Bruce Westerman, a Republican of Arizona, “is a case study in how we can get things done,” Curtis noted. The key to speaking to conservatives about climate change, he said, is avoiding divisive language, comparing the wrong approach to a coercive time-share presentation. “The salesman says to you, ‘do you love your kids?’ and you feel like you're backed into a corner,” he explained. “I think the way we approach this oftentimes puts Republicans on the defensive.”
Hickenlooper agreed, “You never persuade someone to change their mind about something that really matters by telling them why they’re wrong and why you’re right.”
On Rewiring America layoffs, a FEMA firing, and Vineyard Wind
Current conditions: It’s heating up in the West, where temperatures could hit triple digits in parts of California’s Central Valley today• Despite a soggy start to Friday in the Northeast, conditions will clear up in time for a warm and sunny Mother’s Day• It’s hot and clear in Kerala, India, where forecasters expect a wetter-than-average monsoon season to begin at the end of the month.
Electrification nonprofit Rewiring America announced Thursday that it is laying off 36 employees — about 28% of its workforce — due to the Trump administration’s clawback of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awards, my colleague Katie Brigham reported. CEO Ari Matusiak wrote in a public letter to his employees that “the volatility we face is not something that we created; it is being directed at us.”
Matusiak added on LinkedIn that since February, Rewiring America has been “unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” some $2 billion of which were awarded through the GGRF last year to the organization and four other partners to help decarbonize American homes. The Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the GGRF’s $27 billion in total funding, wreaking havoc “on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants,” Katie goes on. Read her full report of the layoffs here.
The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Cameron Hamilton, was fired on Thursday, one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee, E&E News reports. Testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday, Hamilton had told lawmakers that “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate” FEMA — a response to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s remarks that “the president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today.”
Though Noem swiftly appointed Hamilton’s successor — David Richardson, a senior official at DHS with experience in the Marine Corps commanding artillery units — Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington slammed the move, telling Noem, “We have seen an upheaval at FEMA that is going to put lives in jeopardy. We are losing indispensable staff just weeks away from fire and hurricane season.” Hurricane season begins in fewer than 23 days, with the possibility of the first named storm of the year forming before then, and forecasters are also anticipating an above-average fire season. “There is a reason the law requires the administrator of FEMA to have state emergency management experience,” Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, told E&E News.
The Supreme Court declined this week to hear a pair of challenges brought against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind farm under construction south of Martha’s Vineyard. The petitions were brought by the fishing industry lobbying group Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which argued the approval of Vineyard Wind violated protections against ocean users and endangered species, as well as the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which represents Rhode Island fishermen and a seafood company. “We will continue to pursue our goal of shutting down the Vineyard Wind project by filing an administrative petition with the Secretary of the Interior,” TPPF Senior Attorney Ted Hadzi-Antich said in a statement, per The New Bedford Light. To date, Vineyard Wind has — haltingly — installed 32 of the planned 62 turbines, with an anticipated eventual capacity of 806 megawatts.
The Japanese-flagged LNG tanker Energy Glory.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Energy groups and CEOs are seeking exemptions to the Trump administration’s rule requiring 1% of U.S. liquified natural gas exports to be shipped on American-made, operated, and flagged vessels within four years, with incremental increases up to 15% by 2047. There are 792 LNG carriers worldwide, most of which belong to South Korea and Japan; just five, dating to the 1970s, were made in U.S. shipyards and are not currently in use, Reuters reports.
As a result, energy executives and groups, including the influential American Petroleum Institute, argue that the Trump administration’s rule puts U.S. energy companies at a disadvantage. Exporters “have little control over their ability to comply with [U.S. Trade Representative’s] new requirements but ultimately face the consequences of not doing so,” API CEO Mike Sommers wrote in a letter reviewed by Reuters. Building five LNG tankers in the U.S. by the end of the decade to meet the 1% threshold is not doable, Sommers added, because it takes five years to make such a carrier at one of the two U.S. shipyards capable of such production.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that its database of extreme weather events “will be retired” as part of ongoing cost-saving cuts and reorganization at the agency. Though the database doesn’t explicitly focus on climate event attribution, it contains data going back to the 1980s, charting the upward trend of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S., including severe hail, flooding, wildfires, and hurricanes. “This administration thinks that if they stop doing the work to identify climate change that climate change will go away,” Democratic Representative and former meteorologist Eric Sorensen of Illinois told The Washington Post.
Though the Trump administration has made deep and sweeping cuts across the federal government, it has especially singled out climate-related programs and databases. Some grant seekers have been encouraged to reapply with climate-related language removed from their proposals, a rhetorical shift that has also made its way into business branding, as my colleague Katie Brigham and I have covered for Heatmap. In addition to obscuring the picture of how climate change is potentially increasing damage and deaths in the United States, sunsetting the database is also causing headaches for insurance groups and financial risk modeling firms like First Street, whose head of climate implications and co-founder Jeremy Porter told CNN, “without it, replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models.”
The new pope, Robert Prevost — now known as Leo XIV — is expected to follow in Pope Francis’ footsteps when it comes to calling for urgent action on climate change. Speaking last year, Prevost “reiterated the Holy See’s commitment to protecting the environment, enumerating examples, like the Vatican installing solar panels and shifting to electric vehicles,” Vatican News reports.
The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”