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Plants are marching north. Native gardening will never be the same.
Thirteen miles isn’t very far: roughly the length of Manhattan or the distance you run in a half marathon. On a freeway, it takes less than 15 minutes to drive.
Multiply 13 by 10, though, and it becomes 130 miles — more than the width of the state of Connecticut. Move the U.S. border 130 miles north, and Whistler Blackcomb becomes an American ski resort; move it south, and Tijuana is the new Los Angeles. If you started walking, it would take you 35 straight hours to cover the distance; if you called an Uber, you’d be looking at a $450 ride.
The temperature regions that determine the local viability of different plants, called plant hardiness zones, are believed to be slipping north at a rate of about 13.3 miles per decade — not a number that sounds especially alarming, but one that will, over a century, add up to dramatically reshape the regional flora of the United States. In addition to being yet another depressing climate statistic, though, that number is also generating a lot of headaches in the surprisingly combustible world of native gardening.
It’s been 16 years (or approximately 21 northward miles) since Douglas Tallamy’s warning in his book Bringing Nature Home that “unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” Though we may still be far from achieving his long-term goal of a “homegrown national park,” in which Americans convert half their yard space to native gardens, Tallamy’s teachings remain hugely influential in gardening and conservation circles (42 states have their own specialized native plant societies promoting these goals).
Tallamy insists that “all plants are not created equal, particularly in their ability to support wildlife.” If we’re to sustain the remaining biodiversity in the U.S., it is essential to feed insects — and in turn, the birds that eat those insects — the foods they’ve evolved to eat. If a plant isn’t native to these ecosystems, then it isn’t worth planting or sustaining. Often, says Tallamy, doing so is actively detrimental to biodiversity goals.
But what even is a native plant in this obviously shifting world? Already, New York City is considered subtropical, capable even of supporting certain hardy palms; by 2040, Seattle could be in the same hardiness zone that central Florida, New Orleans, and parts of Texas are in today. Researchers have seen plants native to the South slowly pushing their ranges north.
Native plants are frequently the species under the most stress from the new weather patterns in their historic ranges. The state tree of Washington, the Western hemlock, for example, is especially susceptible to drought and is struggling to survive in a drier Pacific Northwest. “We’ve found a lot of mortality of trees that should be in the prime in their life,” explained Raymond Larson, an associate director and curator at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens and a contributor to Great Plant Picks, a viability resource for Pacific Northwest gardeners.
As a result, many horticulturalists with an eye on the next century are actively exploring — and recommending — plants that are explicitly not native. Axios Seattlerecently published a list of trees that Pete Smith, a program director at the Arbor Day Foundation, believes will be able to tolerate the next 50 to 100 years in the region, and it notably included the Japanese pagoda tree; the pawpaw, a native of the East Coast; and the ginkgo, which is “incredibly tough, very long-lived, and great at tolerating urban stresses” — but an exotic from China that is particularly reviled by Tallamy.
“What honestly most gardeners — many gardeners, anyway — have kind of lost track of is what the word ‘native’ means,” Smith explained to me when I followed up to ask about the globe-spanning range of his recommendations. “It is presumptuous, even, to talk about native plants as if 1492 was some magic date that talks about what is and was native to this continent.”
“Native” doesn’t have a hard and fast definition. In Bringing Nature Home, Tallamy writes that a true native is a plant that interacts “with the community that historically helped shape it,” but he also warns against using too small a timescale when making these determinations: “[A] history measured in centuries is the tiniest drop in the proverbial bucket of evolutionary time.” Native plant purists, Smith added, will argue that “the only quality tree is a tree that was grown from a seed from right underneath the tree that bore that seed. Isn’t that a wonderful ideal? [But] it’s not practical.”
Some native plant proponents have allowed for species that are retreating north (or up) on their own volition since these changes happen slowly and food-chain communities can relocate with them. A number of Southern species in the United States got there in the first place by being pushed down during the last ice age, and have been reclaiming prehistoric ranges as the cold has receded over the last 10,000 years. But ancient forests don’t appear to have migrated as complete ecosystems during these upheavals; it was a race of every-species-for-itself. “There’s a lot more interchangeability among members of an ecosystem than people had thought,” David Jablonski, a paleontologist, told the Smithsonian.
There is also the problem that the climactic zones are moving faster than trees can follow. “The average forest migrates at a rate of roughly 1,640 feet each year,” Wired has written — that is, about three miles in a decade. In order “to outrun climate change,” trees would need to book it north at a rate of “approximately 9,800 to 16,000 feet” a year, or about 10 times as fast. Plenty of foresters aren’t waiting around for that to happen and are seriously exploring the controversial idea of human-assisted migration.
Larson, at the UW Botanic Gardens, meanwhile, said their horticulturalists are looking off-continent for inspiration for the hard years ahead. “We’re experimenting more with plants in Mediterranean climates,” he said, and “also the southern hemisphere: Australia, Chile, New Zealand." Places that have "somewhat similar climates," to the Pacific Northwest, “but tend to get a little bit hotter." And while some of these experiments haven’t panned out as hoped in the past, “we’re going to try them again, because 5 or 10 degrees can make all the difference.”
The conventional wisdom, that introducing or nurturing exotics results in a decline in biodiversity, is also being challenged — often heatedly so. It can seem at times that for every study that expounds on the evils wrought by alien plants, another concludes the exact opposite. The ongoing debate has produced fiery polemics, such as one signed by 19 ecologists and published in Nature in 2011, which announced “it is time … to ditch this preoccupation with the native-alien dichotomy and embrace more dynamic and pragmatic approaches … better suited to our fast-changing planet.” The scientists also swatted down the frequent synonymizing of “nativeness” with “good,” pointing out that “the insect currently suspected to be killing more trees than any other in North America is the native mountain pine beetle.”
(These sorts of back-and-forths are presumably what led former Arnold Arboretum horticulturist Peter Del Tredici, one of the Nature letter’s signatories, to observe, “the use of exotic versus native species … seems to bring out the worst in people, not unlike the debates over gun control and abortion.” Whoever said gardening was boring?)
Arthur Shapiro, a distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California at Davis, is also among those who have challenged the uncompromising emphasis on the superiority of native plants. “There are many nonnative plants grown in gardens that are immensely useful to butterflies and other pollinators,” Shapiro told me. “And there are many native plants that are completely useless. They might as well be made with rubber or wood.” If you were to uproot every exotic plant in urban California, for instance, you’d “essentially do away with the butterfly fauna.”
That’s partially due to a principle known as ecological fitting, which is “what happens when species with totally disparate histories, that evolved in different parts of the world, come into contact — perhaps as a result of commerce, perhaps as a result of gardening — and they fit together,” said Shapiro. “It’s a marriage made in heaven.” Additionally, oft-vilified “novel ecosystems”, sometimes disparagingly dismissed as “trash ecosystems," arise when exotic species are naturalized due to human influence and/or certain native species recede. Increasingly, though, scientists like Shapiro are viewing these emerging anthropocenic systems as environmental success stories. An unmanaged invasive pine plantation in Puerto Rico, for example, was found to have far more biodiversity than a nearby native-only forest of the same age, Nature recounts; the observation, made in 1979, ran so counter to the established beliefs about the sanctity of native plants that “it took almost a decade" for the resulting paper to pass peer review.
The native/non-native dichotomy is undoubtedly clumsy, so much so that one idea has been to dispense with the unhelpful language altogether. “Neonative,” a term proposed by University of Vienna conservation biologist Franz Essl, for example, could be adapted to describe species that have moved beyond their native ranges and established new foothold populations “due to human-induced changes of the biophysical environment, but not as a result of direct movement by human agency.”
Another idea is to take a step back, put our preconceived notions in check, and learn from what we’re seeing. “As climate changes, communities are going to change, mixtures are going to change,” Shapiro said. “Trying to stop it — except for managing things of economic or medical importance, pests, or disease vectors — is equivalent to trying to plow the sea. It’s futile. So we should actually be paying close attention to what’s happening, because we can learn a lot from it, about how communities self-assemble.”
This isn’t your permission to go plant a bunch of English ivy and scotch broom, though. Two things can potentially both be true: certain native plants have essential ecological functions and some non-native plants can play an important role in shaping future ecosystems. In fact, they’re going to have to, if the climate keeps warming and the hardiness zones continue their upward march.
“We would always tell someone: choose native first,” Smith, of the Arbor Day Foundation, concurred. But at the same time, “Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
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On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.
On the Senate Finance Committee’s budget proposal, the NRC, and fossil-fuel financing
Current conditions: A brush fire that prompted evacuations in Maui on Sunday and Monday is now 93% contained • The Des Moines metro area issued its first-ever ban on watering lawns due to record nitrate concentrations in nearby rivers • For only the fourth time since 1937, Vancouver, British Columbia got no rain at all in the first half of June. The dry streak may finally break tonight.
The Senate Finance Committee published its portion of the budget reconciliation bill on Monday night, including details of its highly anticipated plan to revise the nation’s clean energy tax credits. Though the Senate version slightly softens the House’s proposed phase out of tax credits, “the text would still slash many of the signature programs of the Inflation Reduction Act,” my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Robinson Meyer write in their breakdown of the bill. Other changes to be aware of include:
There’s more, too, which you can read here.
President Trump fired Chris Hanson, a Democrat and his first-term appointee to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Friday. Trump “terminated my position … without cause, contrary to existing law and longstanding precedent regarding removal of independent agency appointees,” Hanson said in his announcement, published Monday. Since the creation of the NRC, which regulates nuclear power, no commissioner has ever been fired from the body.
After being appointed by Trump in 2020, Hanson was promoted to chair the commission by President Biden in 2021. His term ended in January, after which he returned to serving on the board, Notus reports. Trump’s decision to fire Hanson comes on the heels of his recent flurry of executive orders aimed at quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity, including a measure seeking to “simplify and accelerate the NRC’s licensing procedure, giving the body 18 months to issue new rules and guidance designed to shorten the timeline for processing new applications to 18 months at the longest,” as my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Katie Brigham explained last month. News of Hanson’s firing was met with “serious dismay” by attendees of the American Nuclear Society conference underway in Chicago, per Katy Huff, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a statement, ANS argued that a “competent, effective, and fully staffed [NRC] is essential to the rapid deployment of new reactors and advanced technologies.”
Banks increased fossil fuel financing by more than one-fifth in 2024, marking the first time that fossil fuel financing has failed to decline since 2021, a new report by the Rainforest Action Network and other environmental groups found. Among the world’s top 65 largest banks, coal, oil, and gas assets rose by $162 billion, to $869 billion, with JPMorgan Chase seeing the biggest increase of more than a third to $53.5 billion, followed by Citigroup, Bank of America, and Barclays. In a statement to the Financial Times, JPMorgan said it believed its own data “reflects our activities more comprehensively,” and said it provided $1.29 in clean-energy financing for every dollar financing fossil fuels. However, as the report argues, “Banks are abandoning their previously announced emissions reduction targets in favor of temperature trajectories that allow for more fossil fuel finance. Though they may also increase financing of renewable energy, banks’ continued fossil fuel finance entrenches climate chaos and undercuts clean energy development.” Read the full findings here.
Drivers in Europe are becoming more unwilling to consider switching to an electric vehicle, outpacing even the growing reluctance seen in the United States, according to a new survey published by Shell on Tuesday. In Europe, 41% of respondents said they’d consider switching to an EV, down from 48% last year, while in the U.S., the number fell only 3 percentage points, to 31%. “Europe surprised us,” David Bunch, Shell’s chief for mobility and convenience, said, per Reuters. “The single biggest barrier to entry is the cost of the vehicle.”
While Shell — the world’s second-biggest fossil fuel company by revenue and profit — might seem an unlikely source for an electric vehicle survey, the company also has the most extensive EV charging network in the UK. Its findings weren’t all negative, either: in China, interest in buying an electric vehicle was as high as 89%. Additionally, Shell found that nine in 10 EV drivers would consider purchasing an electric vehicle again, and 60% said they worry less about running out of charge than they did a year ago, Bloomberg reports. Separately, International Energy Agency data shows that electric vehicle adoption continues at a healthy pace worldwide, exceeding 17 million sales globally in 2024, or a share of more than 20%.
Global electric car sales, 2014-2024
IEA
The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced its commitment of £7.9 billion, or more than $10 billion, to the nation’s most extensive flood defense infrastructure program in its history. The program will not only include traditional construction, such as flood barriers, but also nature-based solutions like reforestation and wetland restoration, according to Business Green. In its announcement, the government said that for every £1 invested, it expected to prevent £8 in economic damage. “Protecting citizens is the first duty of any government,” Environment Secretary Steve Reed said in a statement, adding, “As our changing climate continues to bring more extreme weather to the nation, it's never been more vital to invest in new flood defences and repair our existing assets.” Separately, the U.K. Treasury also announced Tuesday a plan to spend £1 billion, or about $1.3 billion, on “funding to repair bridges, tunnels, and flyovers that are facing increased impacts from extreme weather and heavier vehicles,” Business Green adds.
Republicans in Los Angeles who don’t have air conditioning are “more likely to consider climate change a human-caused threat and more likely to support individual and government action to address climate change” than Republicans who have central air, a recent study published by the American Meteorological Society found. There was no similar divide among Democrats.