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Experts explain what you can do about the smoke engulfing the East Coast and Midwest.
Canadian wildfire smoke has descended upon large swaths of the Midwest and Eastern United States this week, and as of publication tens of millions of Americans are living under air quality alerts warning them not to go outside. As my colleague Jeva Lange writes, the air in New York City today is reminiscent of a time before the Clean Air Act existed.
Wildfires, for the most part, have historically been the purview of the West; East Coasters, accustomed to hurricanes and blizzards, have mostly managed to avoid the fallout from forest fires. That’s not quite so true anymore, and this week’s smoke is a likely preview of how things will work in the future. So how should people react when smoke makes its way to their cities?
To find out, I called up two doctors from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health: Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics, population, and data science; and Kimberly Humphrey, an emergency physician and a fellow at the school’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. I spoke separately to Dominici and Humphrey; our conversations have been combined and edited for length and clarity.
Dominici: I think the way to think about it is not to be overly panicking, but maybe it’s a day to not spend hours outside exercising. For people that have compromised immune systems or existing respiratory or cardiovascular diseases, it would be good to limit outdoor exposure as much as possible. So don't panic but be cautious.
Humphrey: Smoke from wildfires is a complex mixture of things. The thing about wildfires is they can burn anything. If a house is burning, for example, you have really complex mixtures of whatever is in that house that’s going into the air.
The one that we really worry about is the fine particles, which are known as PM 2.5 (i.e. particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers). They’re very little particles that people breathe in which have really significant impacts on heart and lung function, particularly in people who have chronic health conditions. But the impacts are still significant for people who are healthy previously and have no underlying health problems. It can cause coughing, wheezing, difficulty breathing, eye irritation, and short-term issues with lung function, even in people who don’t have any previous problems with their lungs.
Dominici: It’s not like walking by, for example, a construction site. You can see that dust, and those are not small particles. Those are coarse particles that make you cough or sneeze or bring tears to your eyes. That’s actually good, because you’re basically filtering them out. But these small particles, you don’t feel them. They penetrate very deep into the lungs, and then they cause inflammation that makes our immune response less effective.
Dominici: We know that these exposures to high-level fine particulate matter have both an immediate effect and a very acute effect. So we see an increase in, for example, hospital admissions, which go up the same day and the day after. But there have also been lots of studies that have documented that this effect can last for a very long time. We see chronic effects including effects on cognitive function like an exacerbation of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
Humphrey: The first thing we would say is stay inside, shut your windows, stay away from the smoke, maybe buy an air purifier, exercise indoors.
But one of the tricky things with giving this kind of advice is that wildfire smoke affects people who are from disadvantaged socioeconomic communities more predominantly. And those are often the people that can't do the things that we would recommend to protect their health. For instance, many people have to go out to work or may be sleeping rough or have housing insecurity, and they don't have access to well-structured houses that protect them against wildfire smoke. So there's a real inequity there about the ability for people to follow the advice to keep themselves safe.
Dominici: You can totally take your dog for a walk or your kid to the playground, but if your child has asthma that’s something to watch out for. Maybe don’t spend hours outside, and make sure you have their asthma medications. People with pre-existing conditions should contact their primary-care physicians and discuss if they should potentially change their medication dosage to make sure their exposure to smoke doesn’t exacerbate whatever problem they have.
Humphrey: We’re seeing health impacts at levels below what the EPA recommends as safe levels of PM 2.5 exposure, so when our apps say “sensitive people” it’s probably actually a message for all of us. It’s important, I think, for people who call themselves healthy to understand that you can be a marathon runner and any exposure to wildfire smoke is going to have some kind of impact on you.
Humphrey: It’s very similar to COVID, so cloth masks and surgical masks offer some protection, they’re better than nothing, but they’re not as good as N95 masks. We’d recommend a really high-quality mask like an N95 because it does filter out those very, very tiny particles and offers really good protection.
Humphrey: I think we have the tools. What’s missing is education. So many people have access to air quality data, it’s on an app or on the internet, but they need more education about what to do with it. I’m very, very concerned with the socioeconomic inequities in particular. It’s a lot of the same issues as COVID: All of these issues are really, really hard to solve but are part of this whole piece.
Dominici: In a certain way, COVID has been a wake-up call. We are much more cautious about what’s in our air. I think it’s always important to keep in mind that when we’re talking about the health effects, we have to really understand that they’re a manifestation of the climate crisis. It’s not something we’re going to see in the future. It’s something that’s happening right now.
Read more about wildfire smoke:
The World's Wildfire Models Are Getting Torched
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And that’s on top of the constitutional questions.
One of the biggest stories of the new Trump administration is the president’s attempt to block congressionally mandated spending. So far, most of the discussion over this freeze has focused on whether it violates federal law and the Constitution. But another front is likely to open soon in that legal battle — and it has received much less attention.
On his first day in office, Trump froze all federal spending tied to the Inflation Reduction Act and the $1 trillion infrastructure law passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. Although Trump has since relented on other spending freezes — such as a short-lived block on virtually all federal payments — he has continued to withhold these energy, climate, and infrastructure funds, even after a federal judge ordered their release on Monday.
Continuing this freeze for longer than 45 days would take an act of Congress, and it’s unclear whether the Trump administration intends to get one. It seems to be gearing up to fight a Supreme Court battle over whether the president has an inherent “impoundment” authority to block federal funding unilaterally (more on that later).
That constitutional fight will obviously be extremely important. But as hundreds of CEOs and local government officials are now surely realizing, this battle is not the only legal front on which the Trump administration’s spending freeze will be fought.
That is because — as long as the freeze continues — the Trump administration is going to start violating hundreds or even thousands of contracts and legally binding spending agreements. The Trump spending fight is not only about policy and the Constitution, in other words, but also about contract law.
The companies and local governments that are now being strung along by the Trump administration did not make a vague handshake agreement with the Biden administration. Instead, they signed a contract with the federal government to receive a certain amount of money in exchange for doing a certain activity. The administration might have changed since then. But the government is still bound by its debts and obligations.
Those companies have now spent money — in some cases more than tens of millions of dollars — to fulfill their side of the contract. They have bought equipment, purchased land, and hired workers. Those companies’ contracts with the federal government are as legally binding as any other contract between two parties — and the courts are as empowered to defend those contracts as they are any others.
There is a significant amount of money tied up in these agreements. By the end of 2024, the Biden administration had “obligated” more than $96 billion of grants from the Inflation Reduction Act, while the Department of Energy’s loans office had “finalized” more than $60 billion in lending. Both terms generally mean that a contract has been signed.
As Heatmap has written before, just because the government has signed a contract for a certain amount of money doesn’t mean that the money has gone out the door. Many federal contracts are designed, basically, as ongoing invoicing relationships: A private party agrees to do something for the government, the private party does it, and then the private party brings back its receipts and asks the government for reimbursements.
The government has been refusing to make those private parties whole, even though those private parties have kept up their side of their agreements. (Note that at no point, ever, has the Trump administration claimed on the record that the private entities it’s now refusing to pay are in breach of contract. It is simply saying that it would rather not pay them just yet for political reasons.)
This has several important consequences for what is about to happen next.
The first is that the Trump administration is about to face dozens and perhaps hundreds of lawsuits over breach of contract. The president cannot simply announce that the contracts are void, like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy in The Office. If the president or his officials want to cut off funding to IRA and infrastructure law grant and loan recipients, then they will need to give specific reasons under the contract for terminating and then defend those claims in court — provided that the recipient sues. Under a law called the Tucker Act, companies can sue the federal government for breaching a contract in the Court of Federal Claims, a special court in Washington, D.C. These lawsuits will not be about MAGA policies, but rather about the facts of each contract and whether the parties are in compliance with them.
At the same time, the Trump administration will likely be waging a fight over “impoundment.” Some officials in the Trump administration — including Russ Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the White House budget office — profess that the president has an inherent authority that allows him to unilaterally block federal funding. This is despite the fact that the Constitution does not mention such a capacious authority, and the Supreme Court has historically rejected other presidential ploys, such as President Bill Clinton’s use of the line-item veto, to accept some parts of the federal budget and ignore others.
This will create, at least at first, a two-track legal fight over the Trump administration’s spending freeze. At the high level, President Trump will be fighting over the political and constitutional question of whether he can unilaterally block funding that has been appropriated by Congress. But at the lower level, federal agencies may be sparring with hundreds of companies about whether they can wriggle their way out of the contracts they have already signed. These dozens of potential smaller fights will command an enormous amount of time and personnel attention — not only from the companies, nonprofits, and local governments trying to secure what they are owed, but also from the Trump administration, which has finite resources.
These skirmishes will have economic consequences — and while these might be small in the context of America’s $29 trillion economy, they will gradually deepen. By refusing to honor its contracts, the Trump administration is forcing private companies to bear public costs. Those companies will delay hiring employees and investing in new equipment as they await repayment; some will furlough workers and go bankrupt. The burden will become more and more significant every day that the Trump administration continues its spending freeze.
These costs will not be randomly distributed through the economy, but rather concentrated primarily in sectors located in rural areas and affecting working-class Americans. Professional environmentalists in Seattle will continue to have a job regardless of what happens to some rural school district’s microgrid project. But the construction workers and electricians set to build that grid will lose income.
For this reason, the energy and infrastructure freeze does not strike me as a very wise move, politically — particularly as U.S. economic sentiment is worsening. One reason it is politically prudent for lawmakers, and not the president, to make spending decisions is that representatives understand their districts much better than federal officials in Washington, D.C.
This suggests the final takeaway: The Trump administration is beginning to play a very dangerous game with the United States. The American economy’s strength and prosperity arises from its territorial resource wealth, its educated and productive workforce, its secure defensive position, and — crucially — a set of financial intangibles that are ultimately backed up by federal contracts. The federal government is the largest counterparty in the global economy because it can be relied upon to pay its debts. If it begins to back out of contracts hither and thither, especially if primarily for partisan political reasons, then it will ultimately damage every American.
This is not a new or novel thought. Writing in 1790, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton said that the “punctual performance of contracts” was the key to maintaining the United States’ good credit. “States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted: while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct,” he said. “Every breach of the public engagements, whether from choice or necessity, is in different degrees hurtful to public credit.”
It isn’t unusual for new administrations to pause some spending at the beginning of their terms, and perhaps the Trump administration will soon prove the worriers wrong and lift the spending freeze. But I fear it will not. It is very possible that in the next several months, the administration will begin to breach dozens of its public engagements. This will hurt the energy, automaking, and construction sectors in the near term. It will cause grief for the president — and, I worry, all of us — soon after.
Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
The Fed on Wednesday issued a report showing substantial increases in the price of eggs, used cars, and auto insurance — data that could spell bad news for the renewables economy.
Though some of those factors had already been widely reported on, the overall rise in prices exceeded analysts’ expectations. With overall inflation still elevated — reaching an annual rate of 3%, while “core” inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose to 3.3%, after an unexpectedly sharp 0.4% jump in January alone — any prospect of substantial interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve has dwindled even further.
Renewable energy development is especially sensitive to higher interest rates. That’s because renewables projects, like wind turbines and solar panels, have to incur the overwhelming majority of their lifetime costs before they start operating and generating revenue. Developers then often fund much of the project through borrowed money that’s secured against an agreement to buy the resulting power. When the cost of borrowing money goes up, projects become less viable, with lower prospective returns sometimes causing investors not to go forward .
High interest rates have plagued the renewables economy for years. “As interest rates rise, all of a sudden, solar assets that are effectively bonds become less valuable,” Quinn Pasloske, a managing director at Greenbacker, a renewable investor and operating company, told me on Tuesday, describing how the stream of payments from a solar project becomes less valuable as rates rise because investors can get more from risk-free government bonds.
The new inflation data is “consistent with our call of an extended Fed pause, with only one rate cut in 2025, happening in June,” Morgan Stanley economists wrote in a note to clients. Bond traders are also projecting just a single cut for the rest of the year — but not until December.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking committee Tuesday, “We think our policy rate is in a good place, and we don’t see any reason to be in a hurry to reduce it further.”
The yield for the 10-year Treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of credit, is up 0.09% today, to 4.63%. While this is below where yields peaked in mid-January, it’s a level still well above where yields have been for almost all of the last year. When Treasury yields rise, the cost of credit throughout the economy goes up.
Clean energy stocks were down this morning — but so is the overall market. Because while high interest rates are especially bad for renewables, they’re not exactly great for anyone else.
Current conditions: Los Angeles is bracing for a massive rain storm that could trigger landslides in areas recently charred by severe wildfires • About 90% of districts in India have received little or no rainfall since the start of the year • Schools are closed in Kansas City, Missouri, where up to 6 inches of snow is expected today.
California’s state-backed insurance plan of last resort is short on funds to pay out claims from the Los Angeles wildfires. As a result, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is asking private insurers that operate in the state to give the program, known as the FAIR Plan, $1 billion. The FAIR Plan is for people who can’t get private insurance coverage because their properties are considered high risk. As weather disasters get worse and private insurers pull back from the state, more people are relying on the FAIR Plan, and its policy load has doubled since 2020 to more than 452,000. The plan has received some 4,700 claims related to last month’s devastating fires, and paid out more than $914 million. But that’s not enough. The program expects a loss of $4 billion from the fires. This is the first time in 30 years that the program has needed to ask for more money. The fee will be divided between the private companies according to market share, and they’ll have 30 days to pay. Up to half of the cost can be passed on to their own policyholders. Even so, there are concerns that this will push private insurers to leave California to avoid further losses, exacerbating the state’s insurance crisis. State Farm, the state’s largest insurer, recently asked regulators to approve a 22% rate increase.
The U.S. added nearly 50% more clean energy capacity last year than in 2023, according to a new report from energy data company Cleanview. Most of the 48.2 gigawatts of new capacity came in the form of batteries and solar, with solar additions rising by 65%, mostly in southern states like Texas and Florida. As for battery storage, four states (California, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada) accounted for 70% of new capacity. Meanwhile, wind power missed out on growth, with capacity additions dropping by nearly a quarter year-over-year. The report says solar growth will likely slow down in 2025, battery storage could grow by nearly 70%, and wind capacity could grow by 80% if all planned projects manage to reach completion. One interesting tidbit is that Indiana is emerging as a solar hot spot. It ranks third on the list of states with the most solar additions planned for 2025, below Texas and California, but above Arizona. Of course, a lot will depend on the Trump administration.
Cleanview
Global air traffic rose by 10% to an all-time high last year, according to recent data from the International Air Transport Association. This means more aviation pollution. Air travel already accounts for 2.5% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, and has contributed an estimated 4% to global warming. As Ben Elgin at Bloombergnoted, the rise in air travel comes as airlines fail to adopt “sustainable” aviation fuel at meaningful levels, with SAF accounting for a paltry 0.3% of commercial jet fuel production in 2024. “SAF volumes are increasing, but disappointingly slowly,” the IATA said in December. “Governments are sending mixed signals to oil companies which continue to receive subsidies for their exploration and production of fossil oil and gas.” Airlines are relying on SAF to curb their emissions, with many pledging to consume 10% SAF by 2030. But “even if airlines can somehow replace 10% of their fuel with lower-emitting alternatives by the end of the decade, those climate benefits would be wiped out by the industry’s expected growth,” wrote Elgin. Yesterday the Trump administration released a $782 million loan for a plant in Montana to turn waste fats into biofuel. The loan was originally finalized under the Biden administration.
The CEO of Ford Motor yesterday warned that the company could be forced to lay off workers if President Trump raises tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and guts Biden-era legislation that supported electric vehicle production. “A 25% tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Jim Farley said at a conference. He added that ending loans and subsidies for EV manufacturing projects would also put many Ford jobs at risk. The New York Times noted that his comments “offered a rare example of a corporate executive calling into question Mr. Trump’s policies or statements.”
Sales of electric vehicles were up 18% in January compared to the same time in 2024, but growth is slowing, according to research firm Rho Motion. Last month, 1.3 million EVs were sold worldwide. That’s down 35% from December’s numbers, and marks the third month in a row of slowing growth. China’s sales were down last month because of the Chinese New Year. Meanwhile, sales were up in Europe as new emissions standards came into effect. And in the U.S. and Canada, sales rose 22%. Rho Motion expects more than 20 million EVs will be sold this year.
$160 million – The amount raised in a Series B funding round by Chestnut Carbon. The startup focuses on planting trees and vegetation, and improving forest management practices to better remove carbon from the atmosphere. Chestnut will use this latest funding to build out afforestation projects — that is, planting trees in areas where, at least in modern times, forests have not existed.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the nature of the Trump administration’s actions on funding for a Montana biofuels plant.