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On DOE directives, Orsted, and Volkswagen’s affordable EV
Current conditions: Back-to-back winter storms are hammering states in the Northeast with ice and snow • Atmospheric rivers have dropped more than 2 feet of rain on parts of Northern California in recent days • Temperatures could soar above 120 degrees Fahrenheit this week in Western Australia.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed an order yesterday telling the Department of Energy to “unleash American energy” and restore “energy dominance” in line with President Trump’s agenda. Wright, who was confirmed by the Senate on Monday, began his order by denigrating the quest for a carbon-free future, claiming that net-zero policies “threaten the reliability of our energy system, and undermine our energy and national security.” After getting that out of the way, he went on to outline the following priorities:
The Army Corps of Engineers has paused all permitting for well over 100 actions related to renewable energy projects across the country. In a statement to Heatmap’s Jael Holzman, the Army Corps confirmed it has “temporarily paused evaluation on” 168 pending permit actions “focused on regulated activities associated with renewable energy projects.” According to the statement, the Army Corps froze work on those permitting actions “pending feedback from the Administration on the applicability” of an executive order Trump issued on his first day in office, “Unleashing American Energy,” and that the agency “anticipates feedback on or about” February 7 from administration officials. Climate advocates are already pressing the panic button. “This is a 5 alarm fire alert,” Nick Abraham, state communications director for League of Conservation Voters, wrote on Bluesky in response to Holzman’s reporting. “This could decimate all the clean energy we worked to pass under Biden.”
The Danish wind power company Orsted, which has a number of wind projects in the United States, said yesterday that it will “reduce its investment programme” by a quarter through 2030. This planned reduction will be global, not just in the United States, where the Trump administration has put a virtual embargo on new offshore wind permitting. The company said that it will still install more than 8 gigawatts of wind capacity over the next three years. Orsted replaced its chief executive Mads Nipper last week after it took a writedown of over $1.5 billion thanks to delays on its Sunrise wind project off the coast of Long Island. The company said it was scaling back its investments in order to maintain its credit rating. “Orsted has experienced challenges, especially related to the U.S. offshore wind portfolio, which have led to further pressure on our credit metric,” the company said in a statement.
Carbon Mapper yesterday released another tranche of data from its greenhouse gas-measuring satellite, the Tanager-1, shedding light on more than 300 newly-spotted CO2 and methane plumes. The largest methane source in Carbon Mapper’s database by far remains the U.S. Permian Basin, where oil and gas operations are concentrated. The Tanager-1 satellite, launched in August 2024, has identified 707 methane plumes from 588 sources across the world. Fossil fuel production accounts for 522 of those plumes and 458 of the sources. Here is a glance at some of the methane plumes spotted in the U.S., and zooming in on part of the Permian Basin
Carbon Mapper
Carbon Mapper
Volkswagen gave employees a glimpse of its upcoming affordable EV model yesterday. The car is part of a new lineup that the company no doubt hopes will help it keep pace with Tesla and BYD. “We set the largest future plan in Volkswagen’s history in motion,” CEO Thomas Schäfer said. “We are pursuing an ambitious path to ensure we achieve our shared goals with full commitment. A key step in this is making e-mobility attractive for everyone – that is our brand promise.” The entry-level EV will go on sale in Europe in 2027 with a base price of €20,000, which is about $20,800. It’s not clear if the car will come to the U.S. VW recently canceled the rollout of its ID.7 in the States. VW will start showing off the car – rumored to be called the ID.ONE – to the public next month. But here’s an image released yesterday:
Volkswagen
Novo Nordisk’s emissions grew by 25% last year due to increased production of its popular obesity drug, Wegovy.
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On mercury rising, climate finance, and aviation emissions
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Andrea has become the first named Atlantic storm of 2025 • Hundreds of thousands are fleeing their homes in southwest China as heavy rains cause rivers to overflow • It’s hot and humid in New York’s Long Island City neighborhood, where last night New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani delivered his victory speech after defeating former governor and longtime party power broker Andrew Cuomo in the race’s Democratic primary.
The brutal heat dome baking the eastern half of the United States continues today. Cooler weather is in the forecast for tomorrow, but this heat wave has broken a slew of temperature records across multiple states this week:
In Washington, D.C., rail temperatures reached a blistering 135 degrees, forcing the city’s Metro to slow down train service. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the heat sickened more than 150 people attending a high school graduation ceremony. As power demand surged, the Department of Energy issued an energy emergency in the Southeast to “help mitigate the risk of blackouts.”
As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin pointed out on Tuesday, in terms of what is on the grid and what is demanded of it, this may be the easiest summer for a long time. “Demands on the grid are growing at the same time the resources powering it are changing,” Zeitlin writes. “Electricity load growth is forecast to grow several percent a year through at least the end of the decade. At the same time, aging plants reliant on oil, gas, and coal are being retired (although planned retirements are slowing down), while new resources, largely solar and batteries, are often stuck in long interconnection queues — and, when they do come online, offer unique challenges to grid operators when demand is high.”
A group of 21 Democrat-led states including New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, and California, is suing the Trump administration for cutting billions of dollars in federal funding, including grants related to climate change initiatives. The lawsuit says federal agencies have been “unlawfully invoking a single subclause” to cancel grants that the administration deems no longer align with its priorities. The clause in question states that federal agencies can terminate grants “pursuant to the terms and conditions of the federal award, including, to the extent authorized by law, if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” The states accuse the administration of leaning on this clause for “virtually unfettered authority to withhold federal funding any time they no longer wish to support the programs for which Congress has appropriated funding.”
The rollback has gutted projects across states and nonprofits that support diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as climate change preparation programs and research. The states say the clause is being used unlawfully, and hope a judge agrees. “These cuts are simply illegal,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James. “Congress has the power of the purse, and the president cannot cut billions of dollars of essential resources simply because he doesn’t like the programs being funded.”
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A brief update from the Bonn Climate Change Conference in Germany: A group of 44 “Least Developed Countries” have called for rich countries to triple the financing goal for climate change adaptation by 2030 compared to 2022 levels. The current target sits at $40 billion a year by 2025, a number set back in 2021 at COP26. According toClimate Home News, tripling the financing goal on 2022 levels would bring in a little less than $100 billion annually. That’s far short of the $160 billion to $340 billion that the United Nations estimates will be needed by 2030. The Indian Express also reports that developing countries have “managed to force a reopening of discussions on the obligations of developed nations to ‘provide’ finance, and not just make efforts towards ‘mobilising’ financial resources, for climate action.” The issue will also be discussed at COP30 in Brazil later this year. The Bonn conference has been running since June 16 and ends tomorrow.
In the UK, aviation is now a bigger source of greenhouse gas emissions than the power sector, according to a new report from the Climate Change Committee. The independent climate advisors say that demand for leisure travel is boosting demand for international flights, and “continued emissions growth in this sector could put future targets at risk.” Meanwhile, the UK power sector has been rapidly decarbonizing, and is now the sixth largest source of emissions. (In the U.S., electricity production is the second-largest source of emissions, behind transportation.) The report also found that heat pump installations increased by 56% in 2024, and that nearly 20% of new vehicles sold were electric. UK emissions were down 50% last year compared to 1990.
The committee applauded the progress but urged more action from the government to cut electricity prices to help speed up the transition to clean technologies. “Our country is among a leading group of economies demonstrating a commitment to decarbonise society,” said Piers Forster, interim chair of the committee. “This is to be celebrated: delivering deep emissions reduction is the only way to slow global warming.”
Voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds. The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.) The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
As a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran takes hold, oil prices are now lower than they were before the conflict began on June 13.
Rob and Jesse talk with Michael Grunwald, author of the new book We Are Eating the Earth.
Food is a huge climate problem. It’s responsible for somewhere between a quarter and a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, but it concerns a much smaller share of global climate policy. And what policy does exist is often … pretty bad.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Michael Grunwald, the author of the new book We Are Eating the Earth. It’s a book about land as much as it’s a book about food — because no matter how much energy abundance we ultimately achieve, we’re stuck with the amount of land we’ve got.
Grunwald is a giant of climate journalism and a Heatmap contributor, and he has previously written books about the Florida everglades and the Obama recovery act. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: How did writing the book change how you, yourself, approached food — or you, yourself, eat? Do you find yourself eating less meat now? Do you find yourself eating less dairy?
Michael Grunwald: I cut out beef pretty early in my reporting. It became really obvious early on that beef is the baddie. I mean, if you’re a vegan, that’s amazing. That’s the best thing you can do from a climate perspective. If you’re vegetarian, that’s also great. But it turns out that cutting out beef is about as good as going vegetarian because vegetarians tend to eat more dairy, and cows are really the problem.
Beef is like, use 10 times more land and generate 10 times more emissions than chicken or pork. And yeah, chicken or pork are worse than beans and lentils. But I, like many people are weak. I’m a hypocrite. I feel like this stuff, it’s sort of like organized religion — you have to find the level of hypocrisy that you’re comfortable with. And I couldn’t justify continuing to eat beef while writing a book about how beef is really the problem, and we need to eat less beef and better beef.
But look, you know, our ancestors started eating meat 2 million years ago, and we’re really, I think, kind of hardwired to eat it. That said, I have stuck to it. I write in the book about how I did a bunch of reporting on cattle ranches in Brazil, and I spent two weeks sort of trying to think about how we could have better beef. And I did fall off the wagon during those two weeks because like, steak is delicious. People told me that, you know, Oh, if you’re still eating chicken and pork, after a month, you won’t even miss beef. And they lied. I still miss beef.
But look, I do think — and we can talk about this — I know in the climate world it’s become kind of uncool to talk about individual action. There’s this whole spate of stories about like, you know, I’m in the climate movement and I don’t care if you recycle, or veganism isn’t gonna save the world. But I honestly think, first of all, emissions are us. JBS and Donald Trump and McDonald’s are not forcing us to eat all this beef. These are decisions we make. Second of all, that if we do take this seriously as a climate crisis — I mean, it’s true. Policy is going to matter more. Corporate behavior is going to matter a lot. But individual emissions matter, too. And I don’t like the idea of people saying, like, Yeah, this is a horrible crisis, but also your emissions don’t matter.
I guess I understand enviros don’t want to sound like scolds. They used to have a bad reputation. But honestly, I think … well, now I think their reputation is for ineffectual rather than scoldy. And I think I liked it better when they were scoldy.
Mentioned:
Preorder We Are Eating the Earth
The real war on coal, by Michael Grunwald
The Senate GOP’s seismic overhaul of clean energy tax credits
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
And it only gets worse from here.
Hot and humid weather stretching from Maine to Missouri is causing havoc for grid operators: blackouts, brownouts, emergency authorizations to exceed environmental restrictions, and high prices.
But in terms of what is on the grid and what is demanded of it, this may be the easiest summer for a long time.
That’s because demands on the grid are growing at the same time the resources powering it are changing. Between broad-based electrification, manufacturing additions, and especially data center construction, electricity load growth is forecast to grow several percent a year through at least the end of the decade. At the same time, aging plants reliant on oil, gas, and coal are being retired (although planned retirements are slowing down), while new resources, largely solar and batteries, are often stuck in long interconnection queues — and, when they do come online, offer unique challenges to grid operators when demand is high.
For the previous 20 years, load growth has been relatively steady, Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins, explained to me. “What’s different is that load is trending up,” he said. “When you’re buying and making arrangements for the summer, you have to aim a bit higher.”
Nowhere is the combined and uneven development of the grid’s supply and demand more evident than in PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest electricity market, spanning from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. The grid now has to serve new load in Virginia’s “data center alley,” while aggressive public policy promoting renewables in states such as Maryland and New Jersey has made planning more complicated thanks to the different energy generation and economic profiles of wind, solar, and batteries compared to gas and coal.
PJM hit peak load on Monday of just over 161,000 megawatts, within kissing distance of its all-time record of 165,500 megawatts and far north of last year’s high demand of 152,700, with load hitting at least 158,000 megawatts on Tuesday. Forecast high load this year was around 154,000 megawatts. Earlier this spring, PJM warned that for the first time, “available generation capacity may fall short of required reserves in an extreme planning scenario that would result in an all-time PJM peak load of more than 166,000 megawatts.”
While that extreme demand has not been seen on the grid during this present heat wave, we’re still early in the year. Typically, PJM’s demand peaks in July or even August; according to the consulting firm ICF, the last June peak was in 2014, while demand last year peaked in July. On Monday, real time prices got just over $3,000 a megawatt, and reached just over $1,800 on Tuesday.
“This is a big test. A lot of capacity has retired since 2006 and the resource mix has changed some,” Connor Waldoch, head of strategy at GridStatus, told me. While exact data on the resource mix over the past 20 years isn’t available, Waldoch said that many of the fossil fuel plants on the grid — including those that help set the price of electricity — are quite old.
PJM’s operators have issued a “maximum generation alert” that will extend to Wednesday, warning generators and transmission owners to defer or cancel maintenance so that “units stay online and continue to produce energy that is needed.”
PJM also issued a load management alert, a warning that PJM may call upon some 8,000 megawatts of electricity users who have been paid in advance to reduce demand when the grid calls for it. Already, some large users of electricity in Virginia have reduced their power demand as part of the program. There are historically around one or two uses of demand response per year in each of the electricity market’s 21 zones.
“Demand response is a real hero,” Silverman said.
Elsewhere in the hot zone, thousands of customers of the New York Independent Systems Operator lost or saw reduced power on Monday, along with over 100,000 customers affected by voltage reductions. On Tuesday, NYISO issued an “energy watch” meaning that “operating reserves are expected to be lower than normal,” and asking customers to reduce their power consumption.
Further north, oil and coal made up 10% of the fuel mix in ISO New England by Monday night, according to GridStatus data. The region has greatly expanded behind-the-meter solar generation since 2010, which as of 2 p.m. Monday was generating over 21% of the region’s power. But the grid as a whole hasn’t been able to keep up, thanks to a nationally anomalous shortage of gas capacity and still-insufficient battery storage. As the sun faded, so too did New England’s renewable generation.
“You don’t see coal very often in the New England fuel mix,” Waldoch told me. In fact, there is only one remaining coal plant in New England, which can typically power around 440,000 homes — though that’s based on normal electricity usage. On days like the past few, it may power far fewer.
Moving into Tuesday, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright invoked emergency authorities to allow Duke Energy in the Carolinas to run certain of its units “at their maximum generation output levels due to ongoing extreme weather conditions and to preserve the reliability of bulk electric power system.”
The strained grid and high prices come as grid operators question how effectively their current and planned generation capacity can meet future demand. These questions have become especially pressing in PJM, which last year shelled out billions of dollars in payments to largely fossil fuel generators in what’s known as a capacity auction. That’s already translating to higher costs for consumers — in some cases as high as 20%. But even that could be nothing compared to what’s coming.
“If you take the current conditions that PJM is dealing with right now and you add tens of gigawatts of data to center demand, they would be in trouble,” Pieter Mul, an energy and infrastructure advisor at PA Consulting, told me.
Right now, Mul said, PJM can muddle through. “It is all hands on deck. Our prices are quite high. They’ve invoked some various emergency conditions.” But that’s before all those data centers are even online. “It’s a 2026, ’27, and beyond question,” Mul said.
Today, however, “it’s mostly just very hot weather.”