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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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The founder of Zero Emissions Northwest talks about furloughing his staff — and about the farmers he serves, who are also paying a price.
As President Donald Trump has thrown funding for a broad swath of energy-related federal programs into disarray, Heatmap has been tracking the tangible impacts. On Friday I got the chance to talk with David Funk, founder and president of Zero Emissions Northwest, who had to furlough his three employees this week after Trump’s executive order “Unleashing American Energy” paused the disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for up to 90 days.
ZEN’s staff — and the rural Pacific northwest farmers and small business owners that it serves — rely on grants from the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program. As Funk explained in a LinkedIn post on Thursday, the organization has secured 67 grants in its 15 months of operation, each one representing a specific renewable energy- or energy efficiency-related project for a rural customer — think solar installations, heat pumps, better refrigeration, or even agricultural spray drones. But Funk told me that the majority of these projects have yet to be completed, and now their future is in question.
“I do think that we are a canary in a coal mine right now, and we are a leading indicator of impacts that are going to be much larger than what we’re seeing with our program and our company,” Funk told me.
I asked Funk about the work ZEN does, the confusion around learning that its funding was affected, and how he and the customers he serves have responded. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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What led you to start Zero Emissions Northwest?
I’ve been in energy for coming up on two decades, so I’ve got experience in the space. Then the second thing that happened was I married a farmer’s daughter outside of Spokane — so a 10,000-acre wheat farm — and that got me a lot closer to agriculture than I had ever been. And the last thing, about four years ago, I looked at my father in law’s shop and said, there’s got to be a grant for a farmer to put solar on their shop. I found the Rural Energy for America Program, wrote him a grant, successfully won it, and then about six of his neighbors came by and said, “Hey, how’d you get him money? I want money to go and improve my farm.” So then I was the most experienced person in eastern Washington. And the USDA launched a contract called the Technical Assistance contract, which we won in Idaho and Washington. And that's when I quit my job and started ZEN.
In rough numbers, our projects have won about $4 million worth of grant support, and that $4 million worth of grant support is matched by private capital. And then those projects are going to save $20 million over their useful life. So call it $30 million of total investment in rural communities, because the money saved on these farms doesn’t go to anything other than fertilizer for next year’s crop, and seed, wheat, and maintenance and mechanics. All of this gets reinvested in making that farm better or making that business better.
How did you learn that ZEN would be impacted by Trump’s executive order?
We talked to people in the government, and they have repeatedly told us that obligated grants have never been removed. So we were operating on the understanding that once a project is obligated, we can then start working and helping that farmer execute on that project. So Trump takes office, we’re still heads down doing what we’re doing — and we do have this belief that the work that we’re doing is exactly the work that Trump wants to see.
We get paid roughly about four times a year, so basically a quarterly invoice. So we haven’t been paid since October. We submitted an invoice in early January for our normal operating procedures, and the USDA processed that in the first week of the Trump administration, and said, “Cool. They’ve done everything, press pay,” and it didn’t go through. We were told verbally that there were back-end restrictions.
We thought it was all tied to this OMB thing. On Tuesday night, [the OMB memo] was blocked, and then on Wednesday, it was rescinded. And all of that’s happening in real time with everybody in the country — not just us citizens, but employees as well. Bureaucrats going, we’re learning about this by tweet, too! And then on Wednesday, we learned in real time with our partners that [the pause in funding] was actually from an executive order, not from the OMB memo. We made the decision that day to furlough our employees. If this goes for 90 days, it’ll be six months of us not getting paid on our largest source of revenue.
Have the farmers and small businesses that you work with had to halt their in-process projects?
It varies for each project. We have a handful of solar projects that are up, and we’re just waiting on a utility interconnection. So those projects we’re finishing. We’ve got equipment like new washing machines en route to a rural laundromat. That’s going to still happen, because he’s already bought them, but his second invoice is going to become due when those show up on site. So he doesn’t really know what’s going on and how to pause that. But if you haven’t started on your project, we’re advising people to not take on more risk by spending money and [instead] just pausing [their projects].
I know it’s only been a few days, but what efforts have you made thus far to get in touch with the federal government?
I’ve got a long list of people that we’re trying to get in touch with. I’ve told all of our customers — many of whom are in the GOP in eastern Washington and northern Idaho — to call their representatives, as well as if they have Twitter, tweet at Donald Trump. So we’re trying to empower our customers to really advocate for their projects, and that’s our main focus.
I’m sure a majority of our customers voted for Donald Trump and voted for the GOP representatives, and we just want them to really explain how this is damaging their business and their farm.
Given that many of your customers support President Trump, what has their reaction to this funding freeze been like?
Everybody expected that funding would continue. That was the message that we were getting from the USDA — the obligated funds have been obligated, the government has signed a contract. So everybody was surprised about that. But I’ll be honest, their reactions are mixed. Some farmers are furious. They have spent this money. They have taken on a risk. They did so with the expectation that the government would honor their contract. So that’s one category. We have another category of farmer that kind of lumps this into weather — things they can’t control. There’s much more understanding if you did vote for Donald Trump. We have had a farmer say, “Maybe they’ll find some waste and it’ll filter through, and we’ll eventually get paid. We can’t control that, but this might be a good thing for our country.” To which I replied, I want the filter first, not second!
But nobody thinks that their project doesn’t fit this mold of unleashing American energy. Nobody is really doubting that they might eventually get paid, because this is aligned with what everybody wants. We’re helping farmers take control of their costs, generate onsite power, or conserve energy through upgrades that really benefit their bottom line and really improve their own farm. We’re helping them reinvest in themselves through the process. We prioritize Made in America equipment wherever possible. We want to see these tax dollars and these incentives stay in the country. So we’ve actually never had a farmer choose to go with a non-Made in America solar system.
Even if this funding pause ends soon, how do you think about the future of your organization given President Trump’s apparent antipathy toward renewable energy and energy efficiency projects — or at least language that highlights any sustainability-related benefits?
If we’re going to go and apply for more contracts to the USDA, one of my big concerns right now is if we’re talking about [renewable energy and energy efficiency], are we going to get blacklisted from doing the work that we do in rural Washington? We have always been, with our customer base, really focused on finance, cost savings, practicality — and then all of the decarbonization benefits of this stuff is very secondary for all of our projects.
When I named the company, all of those things were also in question, right? I called a farmer and said, “Hi, it’s David Funk from Zero Emissions Northwest.” And they said, “What? You don’t fart?” And he hung up on me. We think about, how are we being viewed by our customers? And with the politicalization of language, are we losing out on a market segment that we could be helping, just because somebody looks at our name and says, well, I’m not gonna work with them? It’s an active discussion always, how we present ourselves on paper.
Through at least 2034, if the state’s largest utility gets approval.
Georgia is arguably the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act economy. The state has been a magnet for manufacturing companies seeking to supply batteries, electric cars, and solar cells in order to capture the law’s generous tax credits for domestically built green technology.
While some of the power that supplies these facilities (not to mention data centers also flocking to the state) is clean — the only new U.S. nuclear reactors built this decade are in Georgia, and 38% of electricity generation for the state’s largest utility, Georgia Power, came from non-carbon-emitting sources in 2024 — the state is now planning to bolster its natural gas and coal fleets to support its enormous projected load growth.
Georgia Power released its 2025 Integrated Resource Plan on Friday, laying out to state regulators its forecasts for electricity demand and how it intends to bolster and adjust its fleet to meet the new usage. These exercises almost always feature eye-popping demand estimates and corrections and addendums to older plans to account for even more electricity growth than had been previously projected.
This time around, Georgia Power says it expects 8,200 megawatts of load growth through the end of 2030, which is already about 2,000 megawatts more than what it expected during its last planning exercise, when it updated its 2022 plan in 2023. To get a sense of the scale of this growth, the new Vogtle nuclear reactors have a little over 1,000 megawatts of capacity each. Together, they took 11 years and over $30 billion to build.
Georgia Power also expects 7% annual growth through the end of 2030, more than double the 3%annual growth through the end of the decade that utility planners expect nationwide.
That new power won’t just be powering data centers. It will also run much of the green economy that the Biden administration tried to build up.
“New and expanding economic development projects in Georgia have progressed more rapidly and on a larger scale than in previous years,” Georgia Power said in its filing. “Growth in emerging industries such as electric transportation (‘ET’), data centers, and solar manufacturing have accelerated since 2021.”
The report also said that by the middle of last year, “the manufacturing sector led in both investment and job creation in Georgia, representing 53% of job growth and 54% of capital investment in the state.”
Hyundai opened a plant making electric SUVs outside of Savannah in 2024, while Kia makes electric SUVs near the Alabama border after making a $200 million investment in the plant. Also last year, the Korean solar company Qcells started making solar panels in Dalton, Georgia and other components in Cartersville; another Korean company, SK Group, has plants in Commerce that make batteries for Volkswagen and Ford. And in the final days of the Biden administration, Rivian got a $6.6 billion Energy Department loan for its planned plant between Atlanta and Athens.
One reason manufacturers come to Georgia is for the power, Tim Echols, the vice-chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, argued in an Atlanta Journal Constitution op-ed Thursday: “Southern Co. and Georgia Power have a reputation for reliability,” he wrote.
And for the foreseeable future that Georgia Power plans for, that means some of its most polluting and carbon-emitting power plants will stay open.
The utility said it would continue operating its four-generator Plant Bowen coal facility, two units of which were previously scheduled to retire by 2028, as well as maintaining over 1,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity at two other plants that had previously been scheduled to shut down at the end of 2028. Georgia Power is asking state regulators to approve operation of the coal plants through at least 2034.
In the update to its previous IRP, Georgia Power extended the life of a coal plant operated by its sister utility Mississippi Power and proposed adding 1.4 gigawatts of generators that could run on natural gas or oil.
Compared to 2022, “the Company now projects capacity needs that necessitate both the extension of existing coal and gas-steam units along with the procurement of new capacity resources,” Georgia Power said in its IRP Friday.
Georgia Power’s parent company, Southern Company, still has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, but said in the filling that “the feasibility of continued progress toward a low-carbon future, including a net-zero future, is highly dependent on the continued use of natural gas and continued technological advancements that will facilitate a reliable and economic low-carbon electricity supply.”
The utility also wants to upgrade existing gas-fueled and hydroelectric plants, as well as acquire an additional 1,100 megawatts of new renewables, adding up to 4,000 megawatts of procurements. Georgia Power’s previous update to its 2022 IRP called for the construction of new oil and gas plants, which were approved by regulators last year.
"Georgia Power's 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) includes adding up to 4,000 megawatts of new renewable energy resources by 2035, including 1,000 MW by 2032, and more than 1,000 miles of new transmission lines. Clean energy resources and transmission solutions are vital to reducing customer costs and maintaining the high level of reliability Georgians have grown accustomed to,” Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, said in a statement.
Whether Canadian tariffs would even apply to electricity is still a question — but if they did, things could get expensive.
Donald Trump reemphasized on Friday that he intends to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico beginning February 1, and while that date is rapidly approaching, the details remain sparse. Although the president has suggested the duties will be sweeping, covering everything from cars to lumber to oil, their impact on one key commodity — electricity — is very much in question.
The U.S. imports thousands of gigawatt hours of electricity from Canada every year, worth in the billions of dollars. While electricity from Canada makes up less than 1% of our nationwide power consumption, it’s a significant and growing source of low-cost, low-carbon power for some regions, especially the Northeast. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has threatened to cut off power exports into the U.S. entirely in retaliation for the tariffs. But even if he doesn’t, if the tariffs apply to electricity imports, then power flows across the border would still likely decline. That’s because domestic natural gas-fired power would suddenly become much more economical.
“Electricity from Canada competes against natural gas power plants,” Pierre-Olivier Pineau, a professor at the University of Montreal’s business school who studies electricity markets, told me. “The gas power plants would be so happy to have these tariffs.”
But whether the tariffs would or could apply to the trade of electricity is still a big open question. While it would be technically and administratively feasible to tax imports of electricity, Pineau told me, there’s no system set up to do that right now. “Electricity doesn’t go through customs,” he said.
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The U.S. International Trade Commission, the federal agency that advises on international trade and tariffs, told me it was not “able to speculate on tariffs being applied to electricity or how that would be done.” The public affairs officer sent me a report from the Commission, however, which confirmed that it would be unprecedented. It states that “imports of electrical energy are not considered to be subject to the tariff laws of the United States.”
Regardless, officials in Maine and Massachusetts began warning about the impacts of potential tariffs on electricity last week. Governor of Massachusetts Maura Healey told business leaders that tariffs could increase electricity costs by $100 million to $200 million statewide, as approximately 5% to 10% of the electricity New England consumes comes from Canada. (I reached out to the Independent System Operator for New England, but the grid operator had no more clarity on whether or how tariffs on power imports would work. “We do not have expertise in international trade, and we’d be looking for guidance if or when a tariff is implemented. Beyond that, we’re not able to speculate at this time.”)
The U.S. generally imports electricity from Canada in two different ways. Some of it is part of a “firm contract.” For example, the New York grid operator has a contract with Hydro-Quebec, a Canadian hydropower company, through 2030, to import up to 900 megawatts of capacity at a fixed rate. Hydro-Quebec also has an agreement with Vermont to supply about 25% of its annual electricity needs through 2038. John-Thomas Bernard, an energy economist at the University of Ottawa, told me that for those contracts, if the 25% tax applied, it would be passed directly onto customers.
But most of the electricity the U.S. consumes from Canada is purchased in a daily or hourly market, where U.S. grid operators just buy whatever is cheapest. Tariffs would essentially force Canadian producers out of that market, Bernard said. “The bulk of what would have to be replaced on the U.S. side will come from gas.”
Whether this would produce a noticeable cost increase for consumers would largely depend on the price of natural gas. In 2023, imports to New York from Quebec dropped precipitously because a drought reduced hydropower capacity, but natural gas prices were also especially low, so electricity prices were not significantly higher.
Low natural gas prices are not guaranteed in the long term, of course. “Natural gas prices are very market driven, and the more we are reliant on natural gas in the northeast, the more demand you put on that supply, the more those prices are going to go up,” Daniel Sosland, president of the New England-based environmental nonprofit the Acadia Center, told me.
And if the tariffs remained in effect in 2026, New Yorkers would be hit much harder. That’s when the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a power line that will deliver 1,200 megawatts of Canadian hydropower into New York City, is expected to be completed. The line will supply some 20% of New York City’s electricity demand.
“I don’t know what the point of all this is,” Sosland told me. Electricity trade between the U.S. and Canada brings mutual benefits, he said. “The idea of tariffs and trying to create a fence along the system is going to be very destructive to customer cost, to clean air, to power reliability, because it’s going to foreclose all these other options that are on the table right now that provide benefits on both sides.”
The exception to all of this is a small population of about 58,000 ratepayers in the state of Maine who live near the border and get virtually all of their electricity from New Brunswick, Canada. William Harwood, the public advocate for Maine, estimates these communities could see an increase of $6 to $7 per month on their electricity bills. Harwood didn’t have any additional insight into whether the tariffs would or could apply to electricity — he was merely looking into the impacts on constituents if they did. “They are electrically part of Canada,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story originally misstated a unit of energy when referring to Canada’s energy exports. It’s gigawatt hours, not gigawatts. It’s been corrected.
This story also has been updated to reflect Trump’s continued emphasis that tariffs will begin February 1.