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If you’ve had the uneasy sense that winter weather isn’t what it used to be, you’re not alone — and you’re probably right. The everyday effects of climate change on the year’s coldest months are quickly becoming too blatant to dismiss.
As annual heat records continue to topple year after year — 2023, now officially the hottest year on record, came terrifyingly close to averaging 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures — winter weather is responding. In some places, it’s turning snowy days into rainy ones. In others, it’s turning cold days bitterly so.
So — what, exactly, is going on? Let’s start with the basics.
The main thing is that climate change is pushing winter temperatures higher. In fact, the average winter temperature is rising faster than that of any other season. Average temperatures in the lower 48 U.S. states from December through February rose by almost 3 degrees Fahrenheit between 1896 and 2021, compared to 2 degrees in spring and 1.5 degrees in summer and fall, federal data show.
The number of days below freezing each year is also on the decline across the country and across the planet. A decade ago, the U.S. was already seeing two weeks less snow cover, on average, than it did in 1972, according to federal data. And parts of the country, including cities in the Northeast and Northwest, are on track to lose over a month of freezing days by midcentury.
But in many places, daily highs and lows aren’t shifting at the same rate. Winter nights, for instance, are warming even faster than winter days — the total number of freezing nights has been dropping in the U.S. since the 1970s. Colder places are also warming more quickly, with the northern U.S. and especially the Northeast experiencing the most significant rise in average winter temperatures.
That dreary, muddy weather that most of the U.S. saw this past Christmas does, admittedly, happen sometimes for natural reasons. Same with the incessant rain that fell (and then turned to ice) across the Midwest and Northeast in mid-January. With every fraction of a degree the planet warms, however, events like these become more likely — or, at least, that’s what hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists concluded in the United Nations’ latest synthesis report on the state of the global climate.
Bingo.
Some evidence suggests that climate change is actually making cold shocks more likely by destabilizing the polar jet stream, which keeps the frigid air in the far northern hemisphere from moving too far southward (and keeps warm air in the tropics from moving too far northward). As a result, the polar vortex that’s normally confined to the Arctic is liable to stretch south and blast bitterly cold air into the contiguous U.S. That’s what happened in mid-January, when temperatures in Montana and the Dakotas dropped as low as -30 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind chill bottomed out at -60 degrees. Cold air from the same weather system blew all the way to Texas.
That said, this evidence is not rock solid. Whether or not it bears out in the long term, it’s important to remember that a warmer world doesn’t mean it will never be cold.
Recent experience notwithstanding, cold snaps — short periods of abnormally cold weather — are going away, too. Their average duration dropped by six days between 1970 and 2021, a Climate Central analysis found.
One of the most predictable consequences of climate change is that, as year-round temperatures soar, an increasing share of annual precipitation will fall as rain rather than snow. That’s just what you get when it’s too warm for water vapor to freeze.
One of the less obvious consequences, it turns out, is that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, enabling it to dump more precipitation — whether that comes as rain, snow, or wintry mix — during a single storm. As a result, even though climate change is making certain places drier, the biggest winter snowstorms are becoming, well, bigger.
This apparent contradiction had a major impact on the parched West in 2023. Drought is expected to become the norm there as the planet warms, fueling epic wildfires and straining already limited water supplies.
But a string of record snowstorms across the West last winter replenished the region’s dwindling snowpack, feeding mountain streams and helping keep drought conditions at bay (and creating a really good year for ski towns). In California, meanwhile, a barrage of atmospheric rivers drenched lower elevations and broke snowfall records in parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
California and its neighbors got off to another rainy (and snowy) start in 2024 — though the recent reprieve from years of severe drought isn’t expected to last.
The best answer we can give you today is to say that yes, snow will most likely still exist. But rising generations probably won’t be able to count on snow falling — and sticking — with the regularity it did when you were their age.
Climate scientists don’t have a perfect picture of how quickly the winters we grew up with will give way to a string of months that are rainy, slushy, and unpredictable, but that’s the direction the evidence is pointing. As global temperatures continue to rise, the trends we’ve seen in winter weather over the past couple of decades aren’t expected to reverse course anytime soon.
Many of the ways climate change affects winter are hard to miss. Snow falls later and less often, and when it does come, it doesn’t last as long. That comes with a few perks for the average American — such as fewer frigid winter days — and huge downsides for the communities, ecosystems, and industries that depend on winter being snowy and cold.
The ramifications of warming winters across the U.S. also extend far beyond the end of the season. Accelerated snowmelt causes plants to green and bloom earlier, which can have cascading effects on soil moisture and drought, as well as on the wildlife that depend on these plants for food and habitat. If snowpack fails to accumulate or melts too early, streams will run dry during the hottest months of the year, when animals, plants, and people need them most.
Traditional strains of some fruit crops — like blueberries, cherries and peaches, for example — don’t grow properly in the spring and summer if the preceding winter was too warm. The increasing volatility of winter weather is also affecting the success rate of wintertime crops, especially in the South. By some estimates, the agriculture sector’s biggest companies could lose tens of billions of dollars in value by 2030 because of climate change.
And pests like ticks and mosquitoes are not only expanding northward, they’re also surviving the winter more easily in their historical range, causing their populations to grow and rates of disease transmission to climb.
Unfortunately, that’s one question we can’t answer — not for every instance of unseasonably warm temperatures everywhere in the world. What we do know for sure is that warmer average temperatures make unseasonable and extreme weather more likely. So in that sense, yes, odds are very good that climate change is playing a role in that thermometer reading.
But also, events rarely have just one cause. Climate change could be exacerbating a natural weather phenomenon, or you might just have gotten a brief winter reprieve. Whether one sultry February day is “because of climate change” isn’t really the point. The point is that, unless and until we stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and start pulling them out, the weather will just keep getting weirder. There is no new normal.
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On Neil Jacobs’ confirmation hearing, OBBBA costs, and Saudi Aramco
Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit in central and eastern Texas, complicating recovery efforts after the floods • More than 10,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern China due to flooding from the remnants of Typhoon Danas • Mebane, North Carolina, has less than two days of drinking water left after its water treatment plant sustained damage from Tropical Storm Chantal.
Neil Jacobs, President Trump’s nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, fielded questions from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday about how to prevent future catastrophes like the Texas floods, Politico reports. “If confirmed, I want to ensure that staffing weather service offices is a top priority,” Jacobs said, even as the administration has cut more than 2,000 staff positions this year. Jacobs also told senators that he supports the president’s 2026 budget, which would further cut $2.2 billion from NOAA, including funding for the maintenance of weather models that accurately forecast the Texas storms. During the hearing, Jacobs acknowledged that humans have an “influence” on the climate, and said he’d direct NOAA to embrace “new technologies” and partner with industry “to advance global observing systems.”
Jacobs previously served as the acting NOAA administrator from 2019 through the end of Trump’s first term, and is perhaps best remembered for his role in the “Sharpiegate” press conference, in which he modified a map of Hurricane Dorian’s storm track to match Trump’s mistaken claim that it would hit southern Alabama. The NOAA Science Council subsequently investigated Jacobs and found he had violated the organization’s scientific integrity policy.
The Republican budget reconciliation bill could increase household energy costs by $170 per year by 2035 and $353 per year by 2040, according to a new analysis by Evergreen Action, a climate policy group. “Biden-era provisions, now cut by the GOP spending plan, were making it more affordable for families to install solar panels to lower utility bills,” the report found. The law also cut building energy efficiency credits that had helped Americans reduce their bills by an estimated $1,250 per year. Instead, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase wholesale electricity prices almost 75% by 2035, as well as eliminate 760,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Separately, an analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Center for American Progress found that the OBBBA could increase average electricity costs by $110 per household as soon as next year, and up to $200 annually in some states.
EIA
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco is in talks with Commonwealth LNG in Louisiana to buy liquified natural gas, Reuters reports. The discussion is reportedly for 2 million tons per year of the facility’s 9.4 million-ton annual export capacity, which would help “cement Aramco’s push into the global LNG market as it accelerates efforts to diversify beyond crude oil exports” and be the “strongest signal yet that Aramco intends to take a material position in the U.S. LNG sector,” OilPrice.com notes. LNG demand is expected to grow 50% globally by 2030, but as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported, President Trump’s tariffs could make it harder for LNG projects still in early development, like Commonwealth, to succeed. “For the moment, U.S. LNG is still interesting,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a research scholar focused on natural gas at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told Emily. “But if costs increase too much, maybe people will start to wonder.”
Ford confirmed this week that its $3 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan will still qualify for federal tax credits due to eleventh-hour tweaks to the bill’s language, The New York Times reports. Though Ford had said it would build its factory regardless of what happened to the credits, the company’s executive chairman had previously called them “crucial” to the construction of the facility and the employment of the 1,700 people expected to work there. Ford’s battery plant is located in Michigan’s Calhoun County, which Trump won by a margin of 56%. The last-minute tweaks to save the credits to the benefit of Ford “suggest that at least some Republican lawmakers were aware that cuts in the bill would strike their constituents the hardest,” the Times writes.
Italy and Spain are on track to shutter their last remaining mainland coal power plants in the next several months, marking “a major milestone in Europe’s transition to a predominantly renewables-based power system by 2035,” Beyond Fossil Fuels reported Wednesday. To date, 15 European countries now have coal-free grids following Ireland’s move away from coal in 2025.
Italy is set to complete its transition from coal by the end of the summer with the closure of its last two plants, in keeping with the government’s 2017 phase-out target of 2025. Two coal plants in Sardinia will remain operational until 2028 due to complications with an undersea grid connection cable. In Spain, the nation’s largest coal plant will be entirely converted to fossil gas by the end of the year, while two smaller plants are also on track to shut down in the immediate future. Once they do, Spain’s only coal-power plant will be in the Balearic Islands, with an expected phase-out date of 2030.
“Climate change makes this a battle with a ratchet. There are some things you just can’t come back from. The ratchet has clicked, and there is no return. So it is urgent — it is time for us all to wake up and fight.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in his 300th climate speech on the Senate floor Wednesday night.
Some of the Loan Programs Office’s signature programs are hollowed-out shells.
With a stroke of President Trump’s Sharpie, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law, stripping the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office of much of its lending power. The law rescinds unobligated credit subsidies for a number of the office’s key programs, including portions of the $3.6 billion allocated to the Loan Guarantee Program, $5 billion for the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, $3 billion for the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, and $75 million for the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
Just three years ago, the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged LPO, originally established in 2005 to help stand up innovative new clean energy technologies that weren’t yet considered bankable for the private sector, expanding its lending authority to roughly $400 billion. While OBBBA leaves much of the office’s theoretical lending authority intact, eliminating credit subsidies means that it no longer really has the tools to make use of those dollars.
Credit subsidies represent the expected cost to the government of providing a loan or a loan guarantee — including the possibility of a default — and thus how much money Congress must set aside to cover these potential losses. So by axing these subsidies, Congress is effectively limiting the amount of lending that the LPO can undertake, given that many third-party lenders would be reluctant to finance riskier, more novel, or larger projects in the absence of federal credit support.
“The LPO is statutorily allowed to take loans on its books to finance these projects in these categories, but it has no credit subsidy by which to take the risk required to do so,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me.
The particular programs that have been eliminated support new and improved energy technologies, clean energy infrastructure, fuel efficient vehicles, and help native communities access energy project financing. The long-running Loan Guarantee Program and the advanced vehicles program in particular are behind some of the best known LPO efforts, supporting companies such as Tesla, Ford, and NextEra Energy, and projects such as Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear reactors, the Thacker Pass lithium mine, and Shepherd’s Flat, one of the world’s largest wind farms.
The Loan Guarantees Program is “the big Kahuna,” Arun told me. “This is the longest-standing program of the LPO. So to see this defunded is like, you’re decapitating the LPO’s crown jewel.”
The program only has about $11 million left over in credit subsidies, consisting of funding that it received prior to the IRA’s appropriations. That won’t be enough to make any meaningful loans, Arun said, and is more likely to be used to “keep a skeleton crew online” for any remaining administrative tasks.
Then there’s the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, which the IRA stood up with a whopping $250 billion in lending authority to transition and transform existing fossil fuel infrastructure for clean energy purposes. Now, OBBBA has axed the program’s remaining $5 billion in credit subsidies and replaced it with $1 billion in new subsidies for projects that “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace” existing energy infrastructure, with a focus on expanding capacity and output as opposed to decarbonizing the economy. It also refashioned the program as the predictably-named “Energy Dominance Financing” initiative.
The new-old program — which the law extended through 2028 — no longer requires LPO-funded infrastructure to reduce or sequester emissions, broadening the office’s lending authority to include support for fossil fuel and critical minerals projects. It also adds language encouraging the LPO to “support or enable the provision of known or forecastable electric supply,” which Arun fears is a “backend way of penalizing the addition of renewable energy” on previously developed land.
“Under the Trump administration’s direction, [the LPO] can use that term, ‘known and forecastable,’ to actually just say, well, guess what? Renewables are not known or forecastable because they are intermittent due to the weather,” Arun told me. So while government and private industry were once excited about, say, turning sites originally developed for coal mining or coal ash disposal into solar and battery facilities, those days are probably over.
Carbon capture in particular stands to suffer from this reprogramming, Arun said, explaining that while the Biden LPO saw potential in adding carbon capture to natural gas and coal plants, its current incarnation will no longer allocate funding in any meaningful amount “because reducing emissions is no longer part of the LPO’s mandate.” Some policymakers and clean energy developers had also hoped that excess renewable energy would make it economically feasible to power the production of hydrogen fuel with renewable energy. But with this law — and really each passing day under Trump — a mass buildout of solar and wind seems less and less likely, making it doubtful that green hydrogen will move down the cost curve.
As bleak as this looks, it’s better than it could have been. There was no guarantee that Trump would keep the LPO around at all. Even in this denuded state, the office can still fund the expansion of existing nuclear projects, and perhaps even the buildout of transmission lines or battery projects on brownfield sites, Arun said, depending on how LPO’s leadership ends up interpreting what it means to “increase the capacity output of operating infrastructure.”
But in many ways, what happened with the LPO looks like another instance of the Trump administration picking winners and losers: Yes to clean, firm energy and fossil fuels, no to solar, wind, and electric vehicles.
Take the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, for example. OBBBA nixed both its credit subsidies and its tens of billions of dollars in lending authority. That’s hardly a surprise, given that the Bush administration created the program in 2007 explicitly to support the domestic development and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles and components. But it means that unlike the LPO programs for which lending authority still stands, even if Congress wanted to, it could not redesign the advanced vehicles program to serve a more Trump-aligned purpose. Safer, I suppose, to cut off any opening for funding EVs and hybrids.
The latest LPO rescissions add to the growing list of reasons the private sector has to be wary of the consistently inconsistent landscape for federal funding, Arun told me. He worries that slashing the LPO’s authority at the same time as there’s so much uncertainty around tax credit eligibility will lead some companies to forgo federal funding opportunities altogether.
“We’ll see if private developers even want to play around with the LPO,” Arun told me, “given the uncertainty around the rest of the federal landscape here.”
Electric vehicle batteries are more efficient at lower speeds — which, with electricity prices rising, could make us finally slow down.
The contours of a 30-year-old TV commercial linger in my head. The spot, whose production value matched that of local access programming, aired on the Armed Forces Network in the 1990s when the Air Force had stationed my father overseas. In the lo-fi video, two identical military green vehicles are given the same amount of fuel and the same course to drive. The truck traveling 10 miles per hour faster takes the lead, then sputters to a stop when it runs out of gas. The slower one eventually zips by, a mechanical tortoise triumphant over the hare. The message was clear: slow down and save energy.
That a car uses a lot more energy to go fast is nothing new. Anyone who remembers the 55 miles per hour national speed limit of the 1970s and 80s put in place to counter oil shortages knows this logic all too well. But in the time of electric vehicles, when driving too fast slashes a car’s range and burns through increasingly expensive electricity, the speed penalty is front and center again. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.
You certainly can notice the cost of lead-footedness in a gasoline-powered car. It’s simpler today, when lots of vehicles have digital displays that show the miles per gallon you’re getting, than in the old days when you had to do the math yourself. An EV puts the hard efficiency math right in front of you. Battery life is often displayed in terms of estimated miles of range remaining, and those miles evaporate before your eyes if you climb a mountain or accelerate like a drag racer.
This is no academic concern, like trying to boost one’s fuel efficiency through hypermiling techniques such as gentle acceleration, downhill coasting, and killing the AC. In six years of owning a Tesla Model 3, I’ve pushed its range limits trying to reach far-flung national parks and other destinations where fast chargers are scarce. I’ve found myself in numerous situations where I’ve set the cruise control at exactly the speed limit or slightly below to make sure the car would reach the one and only charging depot in the vicinity. For particularly close calls, I’ve puttered white-knuckled with one eye on Tesla’s in-car energy app — and felt my stomach drop when I found myself underperforming its expectations.
Fortunately, slow works. Three years ago I managed a comfortable round-trip from what was then the closest Tesla Supercharger to Crater Lake National Park by driving there down a 55-mile-per-hour two-lane highway; at freeway speed, my little battery probably wouldn’t have made it. Today, my fully charged Model 3 might make it something like 130 to 140 miles at interstate speed, depending on elevation. Go a little slower and it comes close to matching the 200 miles of supposed range.
Fear is the speed-killer, sure. The chance of being stranded with a dead battery is enough for any driver to be scared straight into observing the posted limit. But having all that data at the ready had already started to affect my driving habits even when there was no danger of stranding myself. It’s hard to watch the range drop when you slam the accelerator without thinking of the Interstellar meme about how much this little maneuver is going to cost us. With the price of electricity at the fast charger rising, I’m much more conscious of wasting a few kilowatt-hours by being in a hurry.
The difference is stunningly clear in the kind of controlled range tests that car sites and EV influencers have been conducting. For example, the State of Charge YouTube channel recently drove the Cadillac Escalade IQ, the fully electric version of the status SUV that is officially rated at 465 miles of range. Driven at exactly 70 miles per hour until it ran out of juice, the big EV exceeded that estimate by traveling 481 miles. With the speedometer held at 60 miles per hour, however, the vehicle went 607 miles — more than 100 miles more.
Granted, the Caddy’s comically large 205 kilowatt-hour battery — more than three times as big as the one in my little Tesla — does the lion’s share of the work in allowing it to go so very many miles. A peek into State of Charge’s data, though, makes it clear what 10 miles per hour can do. Dropping from 70 miles per hour to 60 caused the car’s miles per kilowatt-hour figure to rise from 2.1 to 2.6 or 2.7.
That’s not to say EV ownership turns every driver into an energy-obsessed hypermiler. One blessing of the huge batteries that go into Cadillac EVs and Rivians is freeing their drivers from some of the mental burden of range calculations. With driving ranges reaching well above 300 miles, you’re going to make it to the next plug even if you drive like a maniac.
Even so, the increased awareness of the cost of electricity might make some of us reconsider the casual speeding we all do just to take a few minutes off the trip. That’s a good thing for public safety: Big EV batteries make these vehicles heavier than other cars, on average, and thus potentially more dangerous in auto accidents. And slowing down will be especially relevant as electricity prices outpace inflation. Consumer electricity prices are up nearly 5% over last year and are poised to get worse: The budget reconciliation bill signed by President Trump last week won’t help, as one projection sees it leading to an increase in annual energy bills of up to $290 by 2035.
To be honest, the biggest problem of slowing down a little isn’t really the extra time it takes to get someplace. It’s trying to conserve in a world where 5 to 10 miles per hour over the speed limit is the expectation. I once had to cross 140 miles of wind-swept New Mexico expanse from Albuquerque to Gallup on a single charge, a task that required driving 55 miles per hour in a 65 zone of the interstate, holding on tight as semi trucks flew past me in revved aggravation. We made it. But if you really want to make your electrons go farther, then be prepared to become the target of road rage by the hasty and the aggrieved.