Climate
AM Briefing: Ernesto Approaches
On the storm’s trajectory, solar cell tariffs, and adapting to extreme heat
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On the storm’s trajectory, solar cell tariffs, and adapting to extreme heat
Unlike lots of tourists, they know better.
On curbing AI emissions, flood resilience, and offshore wind
On record heat, hurricane warnings, and electric racecars
On Biden’s 2024 tightrope, climate lawsuits, and flood insurance
On a major EV joint venture, livestock taxes, and tipping points
Current conditions: Puerto Rico issued a heat advisory for the entire island for the first time ever • Flooding and landslides in Ivory Coast left at least 24 people dead • A fast-growing wildfire in central Oregon prompted evacuations.
Volkswagen announced it will invest $5 billion ($1 billion now, another $4 billion over a few years) in EV pickup company Rivian as part of a joint venture “to create next generation software-defined vehicle (SDV) platforms to be used in both companies’ future electric vehicles.” The move will give VW access to Rivian’s technology, and Rivian a much-needed financial lifeline as it tries to launch its new R2 vehicles while cutting production costs. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said the money will allow Rivian to move ahead with plans to build a new manufacturing plant in Georgia. The news sent Rivian’s stock soaring, and Scaringe said the cash will help the company reach profitability. The company reported a $5.4 billion net loss last year.
Tesla’s Cybertruck was recalled again yesterday. This time, Tesla says the recall (which applies to more than 11,000 trucks) addresses a faulty front windshield wiper, and trim pieces that can apparently fly off the vehicle and hit people nearby. This is the pickup’s fourth recall since sales began last November. The wiper will be replaced free of charge. As for the trim, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tesla will apply an “adhesion promoter and pressure sensitive tape” to make sure it stays in place, or replace it if it’s already missing.
Our current projections for sea level rise from the melting ice sheets may be “significant underestimates,” according to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The researchers said they identified a potential melting process by which warm seawater makes its way into the gap between the ice and the ground beneath it, known as the “grounding zone.” This water melts holes in the ice, allowing more warm water through, creating a feedback loop. “We find that grounding zone melting displays a ‘tipping point like’ behavior, where a very small change in ocean temperature can cause a very big increase in grounding zone melting, which would lead to a very big change in flow of the ice above it,” said Alex Bradley, an ice dynamics researcher at the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the new paper. Bradley said this finding could help explain why the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting faster than scientists would expect, and called for incorporating seawater intrusion into the existing models.
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Data from Booking.com shows how the heat waves baking the U.S. are influencing Americans’ summer travel plans. Nearly 64% of vacationers indicated that rising local temperatures were a factor in their choice of vacation spot for the July 4 holiday, and about one-third of travelers are considering coastal areas, hoping that proximity to water will keep temperatures cool, Reutersreported. Panama City Beach, Florida, and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina were among the destinations seeing a rise in searches.
In a world first, Denmark will start taxing farmers for the methane their livestock emit. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and livestock are a major source of emissions because ruminant animals like cows belch the stuff. Denmark’s new measure will charge farmers the equivalent of about $17 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent starting in 2030, increasing to roughly $28 by 2035. According toThe Associated Press, a typical Danish cow produces methane emissions equivalent to 6.6 tons of CO2, so the new tax could add up to about $112 per year per cow in 2030, jumping to nearly $185 per cow per year by 2035. The hope is that other countries follow Denmark’s lead and that the tax will “lay the groundwork for a restructured food industry.”
“We have fought many wars over oil. We will fight bigger wars over food and water.” –Sunny Verghese, chief executive of Singapore-based agricultural trading house Olam Agri, speaking to the Financial Times
On a Minnesota dam, a California utility, and a Utah railway.
Current conditions: Deadly flooding in parts of the Midwest is forecast to worsen Tuesday before rivers crest midweek • Northern China remains in drought as the southern province of Guangdong suffers flooding, landslides, and mudslides • Western India braces for heavy rains.
The U.S. Supreme Court is due to close out its latest session this week (although decisions could stretch into July), and court- and climate-watchers are expecting it to issue a death blow to a legal precedent called the Chevron deference, which gave federal agencies wide latitude to interpret their mandates where the law was vague. More than 19,000 federal court decisions rest on Chevron as a binding precedent, according to the Center for American Progress, and ending it would add to the already hefty legal burden of defending climate regulations.
But wait, there’s more! On Monday, the court agreed to take up a case that could determine whether federal agencies can consider a project’s indirect emissions when evaluating its environmental impacts. The case concerns a proposed railway that would transport oil in northeast Utah, which had its approval from the Surface Transportation Board thrown out by a federal appeals court last year. The appeals court ruled that the agency’s environmental review failed to assess how the railway would affect future oil development, along with several other environmental considerations. A group of Utah counties say those impacts are beyond the agency’s obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act.
A decision by the Supreme Court, which is expected to hear arguments in the fall, has the potential to apply not only to railways but also to many other projects regulated by the federal government, including pipelines and shipping ports.
A railroad bridge connecting Sioux City, Iowa, and North Sioux City, South Dakota, collapsed late Sunday amid flooding in the Midwest that also put a Minnesota dam in “imminent failure condition,” officials said.
The bridge, owned by BNSF Railway, spanned the Big Sioux River, where the water was about 45 feet high as of Monday morning — surpassing the previous record by more than 7 feet.
Minnesota’s Rapidan Dam on the Blue Earth River suffered a “partial failure” on Monday after water breached the west side of the dam and washed away an Xcel Energy substation. The Blue Earth County Sheriff's Office said on Facebook that it doesn’t know whether the dam will hold but that “there are no current plans for a mass evacuation.”
The enhanced geothermal startup Fervo, which uses techniques borrowed from fracking oil and gas to access heat below the earth's surface to generate electricity, said today that it had signed the “world’s largest” geothermal power purchase agreements. The two deals with Southern California Edison, a California utility, add up to 320 megawatts from the company's Utah site. California utilities are mandated by the state energy regulator to buy 1,000 megawatts of non-weather-dependent power with no greenhouse gas emissions, for which geothermal fits the bill. The power will start flowing, Fervo said, by 2026 and will be fully up and running by 2028.
Extreme wildfires have doubled in intensity and frequency over the past two decades due to climate change, according to a new study. The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, used satellite data to measure the occurrence of particularly powerful wildfires between 2003 and 2023. It found that such extreme events increased 2.2-fold during that period, with six of the past seven years ranking among the worst.
The changes aren’t uniform across biomes: Temperate conifer forests and boreal forests, both of which are prevalent in North America, are among the hardest hit. A report released last fall by Democrats on the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee showed the staggering cost of the fires to the United States. Accounting for damage to timber stocks and watersheds, smoke damage, lost income, and diminished real estate value on top of the property and insurance costs, the report found that fires cost the U.S. as much as $893 billion per year.
Senate Joint Economic Committee Democrats
Coal plants are becoming less dependable as they age, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said in its 2024 State of Reliability report. Coal plants’ weighted equivalent forced outage rate — defined as as “the probability that a group of units will not meet their generating requirements because of forced outages or forced derates,” with more weight given to larger generating units — was about 12% in 2023, compared with an average of 10% between 2014 and 2022, Jack Norris, a performance analysis engineer with NERC, told reporters. Norris said most other generation sources “have remained within a percentile over the same period,” while coal’s outage rates have been on the rise, Utility Dive reported. Rising maintenance needs and pressure to accommodate variable energy sources are also “having a negative impact on these units’ reliability,” Norris said.
Germany will likely stop using coal before 2038 “just due to the economic viability,” the country’s climate envoy said Monday.