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A conversation with Danielle Arigoni, author of the new book Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation
When we talk about climate solutions, we often hear the word resilience. It’s the catch-all term for all the things we’re doing to prepare for the impacts of climate change — things like building seawalls and hardening homes and switching to renewable energy sources. But planning for the future is a tricky thing, and, argues Danielle Arigoni, author of the new bookClimate Resilience for an Aging Nation (Island Press), there’s one section of American society that is left out of resilience as we think of it today: older adults.
Arigoni spent much of her career working as an urban planner for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but it was only once she started working at the AARP that she came to see how aging populations were often left out of urban design considerations. Now the managing director for policy and solutions at National Housing Trust, Arigoni spends her time working on climate-friendly affordable housing solutions.
Resilience, she writes in her book, is not just a matter of hardening physical infrastructure to keep the natural world out, but should incorporate the social connections that shape our days. As the country’s population ages, designing climate solutions that take older adults into account will be crucial not only for saving the lives of older adults, but for creating a more just future for everyone.
I spoke with Arigoni about her research, and what a more aging-friendly form of resiliency looks like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How does climate change affect older populations in particular?
I mean, in a lot of ways. Certainly in disasters, we see that for a whole bunch of reasons, whether it’s mobility, or frailty, or cognitive decline, older adults are not able to respond in the same ways that younger people do. I think that’s partly a failure of emergency management to anticipate those conditions.
But even outside of disasters, we see that older adults oftentimes are living from a precarious financial standpoint. Fifteen percent of older adults live at or below the poverty line, which means they just do not have any available funds to decamp for a few days to safer ground or to weatherize their home or to stockpile resources.
And all of those things compile to a set of circumstances where older adults are either living in homes that they can’t afford to heat and cool in response to changing conditions, or they’re living in places where their homes are deteriorating because of climate impacts and they’re unable to fix them, which then sets off a kind of snowball effect of health problems as well. Something like 80% of all people over 65 have two or more chronic conditions, and when that gets layered on top of extreme heat and wildfire smoke and indoor mold and all of these other things, that multiplies the effects.
Does heat affect older adults in a different way from the larger population?
Heat is the deadliest extreme weather phenomenon in our country, and 80% of the casualties are older adults. And that is for a lot of reasons. To begin, older adults can’t process heat in the way that young bodies can; our ability to sweat changes as we age. So that’s part of it.
But heat also complicates and sits on top of underlying medical conditions and prescriptions. So there might be symptoms of heat illness that get masked because they resemble the effects of things like heart disease, or COPD, or respiratory challenges, or the effect of the medication, so it goes untreated.
And then when you layer on top of that the number of older adults who live alone, who may not even have someone to recognize that they’re starting to be disoriented and lose their balance, or that they are sitting in a house that’s 80 degrees when it really needs to be set at 72 because that person is too afraid of what their utility bills are going to cost that month.
All those factors compile and really just accelerate the risk for older adults in extreme heat. Extreme heat also isolates people further; they can’t go and knock on a neighbor’s door to ask for help if it’s 110 degrees out.
In your book you pointed out that there’s a link between where older adults live and climate risk.
Yeah, something like 50% of the older adults in the country live in about nine states. And those nine states are, for the most part, the states where climate risks are the greatest. So it’s places like California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona, the last of which just saw six straight weeks of 100 degree temperatures this summer. And yet Phoenix is one of the fastest growing areas for older adults. So you have to, at some point, stop and kind of scratch your head and wonder how we can better inform people so that they aren’t moving into areas where they are taking on greater risk.
Phoenix, to its credit, has already said they’re stopping new development because they’re running out of water. That was a recognition of the intersection between resources and habitability and development patterns. I don’t think we’ve necessarily done that, for the most part, in many communities. I think that’s a decision no local official wants to make. They don’t want to say they’re anti-growth.
There’s an interesting political conundrum here. Some of these places, like Florida and Texas and Louisiana, are places with legislatures that aren’t, shall we say, very climate-forward. And these older adults you’re concerned about might not care much for it either. So how do you navigate that?
It has to be education, right? There’s something in the lived experience of seeing that hurricane season is becoming longer and more frequent. That is testing even the presumptions of people who’ve been in Florida for a long time thinking they can live through it. When you’re experiencing more and more disasters to the point that it’s truly interfering with your well-being or maybe your financial viability —, like if all of your money is tied up in your home and your home is now in a floodplain, for example —, it prompts some very real and very timely conversations about what to do. So it’s just a matter of time before the real cost of being in some of these places becomes hard to ignore.
There’s a section in your book titled “Climate Planning and Disaster Resilience Tools Generally Fail The Age-Friendly Test.” What does resilience look like today, and how is it falling short for the elderly?
I think one arm of resiliency is the energy efficiency and carbon reduction set of activities, which is where we’re striving to reduce our carbon emissions. And we’re going to put in place a whole bunch of policies and programs to drive down the cost of that initiative. Another pillar is in hazard mitigation planning. FEMA unlocks a lot of hazard mitigation dollars for states and communities that have completed a plan before disaster strikes.
So those are kind of two disparate pillars: One is climate mitigation, and the other is risk mitigation. Neither of those think about age in a concerted way right now. In the requirements that FEMA just updated for state hazard mitigation plans that had been in place for like nine years, there’s one mention of considering demographic change when you’re writing your plan, but they don’t say you should project who your population is and what their needs are.
I think it’s a real missed opportunity, because those mitigation plans set the course for all the FEMA funds that follow. Oftentimes they become a vessel which other public resources are poured into as well. If you’re not identifying the needs of older adults right at the outset, you’re really missing that nuance in terms of what risk mitigation looks like for them.
Similarly, on the climate mitigation side, there’s a whole set of activities around, for example, making New York state a great place to age, but they don’t tie into the climate plan that New York state has put in place. Wouldn’t it make sense if we focus those investments in bringing utility costs down, in incorporating renewable energy and making energy efficiency investments, in those same places where we know older adults are already paying too much for their housing and are unable to afford to keep their utilities running or upgrade their homes? That would reduce their risk too.
I’m curious about the shortfalls of the solutions that we do build. I think a lot about how in places that are hurricane-prone, for example, you see a lot of houses on stilts. And I’m wondering if there’s just a simple mobility problem here.
I think that there’s sometimes a failure to acknowledge mobility challenges, certainly with elevating homes, but also just in terms of accessing transportation options, and relocation or evacuation options. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t accessible elevated homes, I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t seen any with my own two eyes. But I don’t necessarily know that that’s a really thoughtful solution. Even when we think about cooling centers that are being established for heat waves, it’s great that those exist, but I’m not sure that planners are always thinking about how people are getting to them. Those kinds of breakdowns that are part of the problem.
The harder conversation, frankly, is how do we relocate people out of harm’s way when elevating maybe is not going to be a very sustainable solution? Relocating is such a thorny topic, I think particularly so for older adults who may have lived their entire lives in one location. The notion of moving and being displaced because of climate change is a very, very difficult kind of identity crisis. It’s a pretty philosophical challenge, in addition to all the logistical challenges of moving your home, your community, and your livelihood.
What does climate resilience geared towards older populations look like? It sounds like you’re advocating for essentially an overhaul of a lot of things, because there are all these interconnected systems.
Yeah, it’s not a simple solution. When I think about what a climate-resilient community looks like, it certainly includes all the hard infrastructure that you would want — sea walls or levees, the sort of infrastructure that we think could mitigate risk. But it would also include a lot more thoughtfulness about how we’re designing our communities to live in every day. So thinking about different ways of designing housing, for example: how do we create communities where there’s more housing choice, so people can live in smaller units that will consume less energy and encourage more organic interaction than you see in suburbs? Hopefully they’ll be fueled by renewable energy as well so you’re eliminating that utility cost burden that is really problematic for low-income older adults.
There’s also making sure we have a robust transportation system so that you have not just a public transit system that works and gets people where they need to go every day of the year, but is also designed in ways that allow people to still use it when it’s hot. That means shade and seating, maybe even cooling factors at bus stops. Because otherwise, this transit system will not serve people if it is too hot outside. So you really have to think holistically about all of the elements that it takes to make a more climate resilient place.
I would also say communication and social connectedness is a huge part of it too. A good number of older adults do not have in-home internet or smartphones, so they don’t access the internet on a daily basis. So if you’re relying upon these systems to notify people or to get them to sign up for things that are going to reduce their risks, then you’re probably missing a whole bunch of people. So how do you cultivate a multi-pronged approach where you’re using all the levers you have available to you, including people like home health aides, or service organizations like Meals on Wheels, to get information to people in ways that they can access and utilize it?
Your point about home health aides reminds me that you drew a connection between climate and COVID-19 in your book. What lessons can we learn from the pandemic that can be applied to climate change?
Tragically, what we learned is that older adults are viewed as expendable. I think we somehow accepted the fact that a wildly disproportionate number of people who die from COVID-19 were older adults. It didn’t cause the kind of outrage that I think it should have. And I think some of that same thing is happening here with climate-fueled disasters.
COVID taught us the importance of getting information and support to people in their homes. I think there’s this presumption that when we plan for nursing homes we’ve checked the box, we’ve covered older adults’ needs. But that’s only true for a very small number of older adults — the vast majority live in their homes, often alone, particularly older women. And so how do you get services and information to folks in their home in ways that understand and appreciate their mobility challenges?
It’s interesting that so much of what you’re talking about is communication. I feel like when people hear the word resilience, they think of these big plans to transform the built environment.
I think communication is a huge part of why we’re here. And by that I mean the inability of these different siloed technical fields to communicate with one another. Emergency management and hazard mitigation people use a very different language than aging advocates do, who use a very different language than sustainability advocates do. They speak different languages, and they report in different structures, and they’re funded by different agencies. And never the twain shall meet. There are not a lot of opportunities where those things come together like they should.
My hope is that by communicating more effectively with aging advocates in terms that they understand, using programs that they are responsible for administering, they then see climate change as part of their mission. It needs to be the same way when talking to emergency managers about hazard mitigation plans: We can begin to unpack the unique needs of older adults that might be falling through the cracks in terms of their existing planning efforts. We really need to create this middle ground of understanding.
Do you have a favorite solution? Or maybe a favorite place that has implemented these solutions well?
The one that comes to mind — and I’m a little biased because I went to school there — is Portland, Oregon.
During COVID, they developed a framework to get supplies into the homes of an array of people in the city, to ensure they had what they needed, whether it’s food or diapers or adult incontinence supplies. These are things that were really important to get to people. Then they layered that with really effective community-based organizations that could reach committees that were hard to reach. So they had a Latino group reaching Spanish speakers, they had an Asian American group reaching Asian immigrants, and so on.
After the pandemic, Portland was able to use their relationships with those groups during two summers in which terrible heat waves hit the region. They quickly deployed those same organizations to get portable heat pumps into people’s homes, and they prioritized low-income older adults. They were able to do that because they’d already cultivated that tradition of serving people in that community through trusted organizations. And I can’t help but think that it saved lives.
What do you think the federal government should be doing differently around climate resiliency and aging? Are there particular policies you’d like to see that target aging populations?
I think it needs to happen at all levels, from the local to the regional and state levels. And that can be accelerated by work at the federal level. So for example they could require that hazard mitigation plans, and applications for HUD programs, or BRIC, which is a FEMA program, have to include an analysis of demographic change, and what that means for people over 65.
That’s a step forward, because then you’ve got state planners and local leaders thinking about what their aging population needs, because the share of older adults is only going to grow, it’s not going to diminish.
Similarly, the Older Americans Act is going to be reauthorized soon, and that funds all kinds of agency work that supports home and community-based services so that people can age in place. There’s a real need there to acknowledge the fact that climate change is going to interfere with some people’s ability to do that. And that might mean that they need more utility assistance, because now they have to run the air conditioner longer or put the heater on more frequently. Or it might mean that they need different kinds of supports, like making sure these folks can evacuate during a flood.
Is there something you found in your research that people seem to constantly get wrong?
There’s a general impression that older adults are living their best lives, they’ve got their retirement savings and are going on cruises and playing golf. But it’s just not the case for so many older adults. Something like half of all people who are unhoused right now are single people over 50. There’s a whole set of upstream financial challenges many older adults face, including paying way too much of their income for housing because rents have skyrocketed and they often have fixed incomes. Not to mention all the other expenses that go along with getting older, such as prescriptions. So climate Is a risk magnifier financially as well.
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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.