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Heatmap Turns 1

A look back at a year of distinct climate and energy coverage.

A slice of Heatmap cake.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

I can’t quite believe it: Today is the one-year anniversary of Heatmap. And what a year it’s been.

When I left my old job as editor of The Week, climate change had a reputation among journalists as being the one scary subject that nobody wanted to read. It was too depressing, too technical, too boring to sustain dedicated coverage. That misperception is finally ending — and I like to think Heatmap put some nails in the coffin.

Heatmap’s mission is to tell the inside story of the race to fix the planet. We think this is the most important and interesting issue of our time, so we strive to make Heatmap punchy and personable as well as informative and trustworthy. It’s why you’ll find that Heatmap’s writers follow the facts where they lead and tell you — in hopefully engaging, elevated ways — what they see and hear.

Heatmap is also a bet that readers want to go deep into the nuances and tradeoffs at the heart of the energy transition. We love works in progress — how policymakers are thinking about a particularly thorny problem, how a geothermal company is trying to bring down costs fast, why a community is skeptical of a wind farm. It can be upsetting. It can be inspiring. We hope it’s always fascinating and helpful. After all, this is how the planet gets fixed.

But I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re reading this note, you are probably shaping the future of the planet yourself, whether through your work or the choices you make at home or both. I hope we’ve helped you understand what’s actually happening and make more informed decisions.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll be hearing from our writers about some of their favorite stories to get a behind-the-scenes look at the process behind them.

I hope you’ll also consider supporting our work if you haven’t already. Paid subscribers get full access to our two daily newsletters, our weekly podcast, and all the original reporting we publish on the site every day. They also receive the unending gratitude of our newsroom. (As a party favor for our birthday, you can also get 20% off an annual subscription with the code ANNIVERSARY.)

We know there are other outlets covering climate and energy, and we don’t take your trust or interest for granted. Thank you for your continued support.

Nico Lauricella
Founder and editor in chief

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Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

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Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

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Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

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