Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
C3S
“This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a large and continuing shift in our climate,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the data. “Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm. This is inevitable, unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.”
Meanwhile, 10% of the country’s population remains under excessive heat warnings as an extreme heat wave grips states up and down the west coast. “Dozens of daily record high temperatures are forecast to be tied or broken into the work week,” the National Weather Service said. In Phoenix, Arizona, heat-related deaths have nearly doubled this year compared to last.
Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast this morning as a category 1 storm with top sustained winds of 80 miles per hour. Up to 15 inches of rain could fall on the region, and flooding and dangerous storm surge are expected. More than 100,000 customers are already without power. The storm is also affecting oil and gas operations: The state’s largest ports – including Corpus Christi, the top crude oil export hub in the country – halted all cargo operations and some natural gas storage facilities also closed in preparation for the storm. Beryl killed at least 11 people in the Caribbean over the last week and left islands in ruins. It became the earliest category 5 storm ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers published a report on Friday concluding that human driven climate change likely made Beryl stronger and wetter.
A lawsuit playing out this week in a New Orleans appeals court could be the first test of how courts will treat regulations set by federal agencies after the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent, known as the Chevron deference, that deferred to agencies’ interpretations of their own mandates. In this particular case, 25 Republican-led states are challenging a rule from the U.S. Department of Labor that says employee retirement plans can consider ESG factors when deciding where to invest. Conservatives have argued this amounts to politicizing investment decisions. A Texas judge refused to block the rule in 2022, citing Chevron, but now the landscape looks very different. “The trial court expressly relying on Chevron in upholding the ESG regulation ... puts this case on track to be an early harbinger of how courts will address pending cases,” said Julie Stapel, a lawyer with the firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius. The court will begin to hear arguments tomorrow. The fall of Chevron is expected to make it harder for federal agencies to regulate environmental hazards like air and water pollution.
The U.K. has scrapped its ban on onshore wind farms just days after a new Labour government came into power. The ban came into effect in 2015, and was part of a planning policy that required onshore wind projects to prove local communities did not object to new turbines. The new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, called the rule “absurd.” The Labour Party has pledged to double onshore wind energy by 2030 and decarbonize the power sector completely on that same time frame.
How and when Britain goes green matters on a global scale. “Britain is one of history’s major climate polluters,” as The New York Timesexplained. “It’s where the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, giving rise to a global economy driven by coal, oil and gas and with it, the emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases. So the speed and scale of Britain’s energy transition is likely to be closely watched by other industrialized countries and emerging economies alike.”
NASCAR showed off its first electric racecar in Chicago over the weekend. The ABB NASCAR EV Prototype was developed as part of a partnership between NASCAR, Chevrolet, Ford, Toyota, and electrification company ABB. It hasn’t been driven much yet, and there’s no plan to get rid of gas-powered racers any time soon (in fact NASCAR says it is “committed to the historic role of the combustion engine in racing”), but the prototype is intended to “gauge fan interest in electric racing,” according toThe Associated Press. “As more and more customers are buying all-electric vehicles, there will be, we believe, a growing number of people that want to watch full electric racing,” said Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports.
NASCAR
There are now more than 800 carbon removal startups.
A new report finds that climate lawsuits have risen in the last 20 years. While the overall number of cases has leveled off slightly recently, those filed against companies (as opposed to governments) are growing. About 230 were filed between 2015 and 2023, and the majority of those were launched in the last three years, according to the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Here you can see the number of cases targeting corporations specifically since 2015:
Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
The report says the trend is driven in part by a rise in lawsuits targeting the “professional and financial services that enable the work of fossil fuel companies.” For example, marketing and advertising companies that create positive campaigns for oil and gas firms. And another factor here is sectors that rely heavily on fossil fuels (airlines, for example) but may attempt to “climate wash” by overstating their environmental initiatives. These kinds of corporate lawsuits are becoming more and more common, and more than 70% have been successful. The report concludes that “companies from many sectors are now at risk of being taken to court over the climate.”
Ford has chosen Long Beach, California, as the place where it will build its low-cost EV platform. The city’s mayor, Rex Richardson, announced the news yesterday. Ford has been bulking up its “secretive low-cost EV team” in recent months, hiring workers away from rivals like Rivian and Tesla. The Long Beach campus will open in early 2025 and house 450 employees who will focus on “developing a new generation of small, affordable vehicles,” according to Emma Bergg, a spokesperson for Ford’s EV division.
Many Midwesterners don’t have flood insurance that would help them cover the damage from recent flooding events, ABC News reported. In the parts of Iowa that were inundated over the weekend, less than 1% of single-family homes have flood insurance from the government. One reason is because residents don’t expect to be flooded because they don’t live near major rivers or in areas that have historically been at high risk. But climate change is making extreme rainfall more common. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange explained, “put simply, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, which means worse deluges.”
Rondo Energy, a Silicon Valley startup building “heat batteries” to replace fossil fuels in heavy industries, announced three new customers yesterday. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported, in just a few months’ time, the company has gone from serving a single industry — ethanol — at its pilot plant in California, to making deals around the globe that demonstrate the technology’s potential versatility. With grant funding from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, as well as the European Investment Bank, the company will install three commercial-scale batteries at factories in Denmark, Germany, and Portugal. Each one will prove Rondo's compatibility with a different industry: In Denmark, the battery will be used to produce low-carbon biogas. In Germany, it will power a Covestro chemical plant that produces polymers. In Portugal, it will power a to-be-announced food and beverage factory.
Scientists are surprised to find that some small, low-lying islands in the tropics aren’t sinking even as sea levels rise due to climate change, The New York Times reported. Instead, it seems the islands can “adjust naturally” to the sea level changes, which offers a glimmer of hope to the islands’ residents.
