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These 7 neighborhoods are competing visions of a more sustainable future.
I’m a serial cheater, emotionally, on New York City. As much as Queens is my home, one of my favorite ways to lose track of time is by going down the Zillow rabbit hole and imagining all the other lives I could live somewhere else. If I had $2 million, would I move into a houseboat to live out my Sleepless in Seattle dreams? (You laugh, but at least a floating home is floodproof!). Or maybe I’d go to California to be closer to my extended family? (Never mind — I’d never be able to afford the fire insurance).
Recently I’ve become especially captivated by “intentional communities,” of which there are thousands worldwide and hundreds in the United States alone. These are experimental master-planned neighborhoods that revolve around shared values that often pertain to things like sustainability, communal living, green spaces, and minimizing individual impact — things that might be necessary to adopt in some form on a wider scale in the coming years.
Some of these communal neighborhoods are pretty out there (think aquaponics that runs off a “VillageOS”). Others are so alluring that without even realizing it, I found myself browsing their availability pages. Oops — don’t tell New York.
Here are a few of the innovative neighborhoods that caught my eye:
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Courtesy MVSA Architects
You’ve joked about running away to go live in the woods, but what if you didn’t have to make the choice?
Designed by Stefano Boeri of Verticle Forest fame and Roberto Meyer of the Dutch firm MVSA Architects, Wonderwoods is a 200-apartment, two-tower project in Utrecht, the fourth-biggest city in the Netherlands. The pair of structures, set to open in 2024, look in the renderings like something nature has reclaimed. But the 10,000 plants and 300 trees that will eventually cover the buildings’ balconies, roofs, and facades aren’t just there to look cool.
By decking out Wonderwoods in the equivalent of one hectare of forest, the designers aim to maximize the known benefits of urban tree planting: Plants suck up CO2, help filter out environmental pollutants, and can even generate microclimates that will be important in a warming world (the cooling effects of plants will also help reduce the energy demand of air conditioners).
Wonderwoods’ co-designer, Boeri, has been called “perhaps the most famous name in green architecture,” and he is both prolific and influential: The Dutch project is just one of the dozens of plant-coated buildings that have been, or are being, constructed around the world.
Not all of these experiments have been successful — rumor has it the Qiyi City Forest in Chengdu is overgrown and bug infested — and some scientists have downplayed the greenhouse gas-mitigating effects of so-called biophilic design. Still, if we’re to survive in a hotter, more concrete-covered world, we’ll need to bring plants along with us.
Would I live here?: I’ve always been jealous of people who junglefy their living spaces with lots and lots of plants (Hilton Carter, please decorate my home!). Tragically, I don’t always have the greenest thumb — I’m an overenthusiastic waterer — but the good news is, Wonderwoods has a team of rappelling gardeners who will maintain the exterior vegetation for you. Getting to enjoy the lushness of a rural forest in the heart of urban Europe without having to do any of the work? Count me in — I’d live here for sure.
Live, Work & Play at Wonderwoodswww.youtube.com
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Courtesy Culdesac
Forget electric vehicles: Residents of Culdesac, a rental community just across the river from Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona, are “contractually forbidden from parking a vehicle within a quarter-mile radius of the site.”
While that might sound practically un-American to some, it’s a paradise for others. The 17-acre, $170-million project includes 761 apartments, a light rail stop (which is free with residency), communal courtyards, a coffee shop, restaurant, gym, grocery store, soon-to-open coworking space, car-share pick-up and drop-off, and, yes, visitor parking.
Culdesac isn’t the only car-free community in America, as Jalopnik reports. But while the communities tend to be popular, especially with young professionals (40% of the people on Culdesac’s opening waitlist were from outside of Arizona), “these kinds of developments often aren’t legal to build in large parts of the country due to mandatory parking minimums,” Jalopnik adds.
That doesn’t deter its founders. The long-term “vision of Culdesac,” Ryan Johnson, Culdesac’s chief executive, told The New York Times, is to eventually “build the first car-free city in the U.S.”
Would I live here?: One of the biggest deterrents against leaving New York City is being saddled with car payments — not to mention that my husband doesn’t drive. Despite being located in the heart of the Phoenix sprawl, Culdesac seems genuinely committed to making a car-free lifestyle work for its residents, offering benefits like free rides on the metro, bike parking, $5-an-hour car-sharing, complimentary Lyft Pink, and rentable Bird scooters on site. Coming from the New York real estate market, its prices also seem reasonable — available one-bedroom units start at $1,390 a month. I know because I was tempted enough to look. If only I liked the heat a little more …
Culdesac Tempe: The First Car-free Community Built From Scratch in the USwww.youtube.com
Location: Vienna, Austria
Anja Pfeifer/Getty Images
Vienna is one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe, which has created a massive demand for housing. In order to meet the demand, Vienna is building a city within a city — and taking it as an opportunity to do things right.
With over 11,000 new homes (including the world’s second-tallest timber building), the neighborhood of Aspern Seestadt is nearly net-zero, relying on technology and cutting-edge construction techniques to lower its footprint. Excess heat and electricity in one building can be sent to another, for example, while 80% of its residents reportedly travel by bike, foot, or public transit.
But what sets Aspern Seestadt apart from other green, pedestrian-friendly communities around the globe is its emphasis on centering women’s and families’ needs. For one thing, all of the streets and public spaces in the neighborhood are named after women, but the attention goes beyond the symbolic — the pavement is also wide to accommodate strollers, and ramps are included alongside staircases; parks and other gathering spaces have plentiful public toilets; pram parking and storage are readily accessible. There are also extra safety measures, like more lights in dark spaces, abundant alarms and assistance buttons, and extra guards during nighttime hours.
Buildings in Aspern Seestadt also mix housing with nurseries, shops, and coworking spaces so “women, as well as men, can … better reconcile professional and personal life,” Germany’s Gettotext.com reports. It’s a model more intentional communities should take note of.
Would I live here?:Vienna has repeatedly been cited as the city with the highest quality of life in the world although the picture might not be as rosy if you aren’t Austrian. The expat resource website InterNations lists Vienna as the “worst-rated city” in the world when it comes to the “ease of settling in” due in large part to it also being in last place for “local friendliness.” As amazing as it’d be to be integrated into a community like Aspern Seestadt — especially, eventually, as a mother — it’d probably be terribly isolating to get the cold shoulder from my new neighbors. For the “new girl in the high school” vibes this is giving me, I’d potentially pass.
Vienna is Building a $6BN "City Within a City"www.youtube.com
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Pol Albarran/Getty Images
One of the major criticisms of intentional communities is that they’re not actually all that “green” since they require new construction, which in turn uses up resources and adds to emissions. Additionally, many of the neighborhoods featured in this article simply aren’t scaleable to the necessary degree; 4.4 billion people live in cities and moving all of them into net-zero villages or buildings would be next to impossible.
But what if existing neighborhoods could retroactively be made greener and more habitable? That’s the radical idea behind Barcelona’s superilles, or superblocks, which began reclaiming city streets for pedestrians back in 2013. The basic idea involves cordoning off 3x3 city blocks, diverting thru-traffic around the “islands,” and limiting the roads within the blocks to six-mile-per-hour residential traffic. This transforms the interiors of the superblocks into safe places for pedestrians to walk and kids to play; the new green spaces help eliminate the urban heat island effect and boost mental health; and the walkability encourages increased foot traffic, in turn reducing emissions.
The experiment has been an enormous success: NO2 pollution has dropped 33%; noise in superblocks dipped by 9 decibels, and local businesses have seen increased sales as residents opt to shop within walking distance, a positive illustration of the urban planning concept known as the 15-minute city.
Today, there are only six superblocks in the capital of Catalonia, but the goal is to expand the concept city-wide to potentially as many as 500. In the next decade, it aims for every resident to have a public square and a green street within 650 feet of their home.
Would I live here?:Psst, New York City, can’t you take a hint? The COVID-19 pandemic gave New Yorkers a taste of what it might be like if our city prioritized the needs of pedestrians over drivers with its “open streets” program, although most of that progress has been rolled back. Barcelona is proving we could be better if only we had our priorities in the right place. Sure, it’s a sí from me when it comes to moving to Spain, but it’d be even neater if we could bring the superblock experiment back home.
Superblocks: How Barcelona is taking city streets back from carswww.youtube.com
Location: Near Amsterdam, Netherlands
Courtesy ReGen
“The Tesla of Eco-Villages” might not sound quite as appealing as it once did. But if you want to live minimally but aren’t quite ready to give up your Apple Watch, then ReGen Villages might be for you.
While other projects I've highlighted reimagine urban living, ReGen Villages wants to reinvent the “neighborhood development outside of cities.” The 50-acre community of 300 homes is planned for a rural region about a half-hour drive outside of Amsterdam and aims to combine vertical farming, aquaponics, renewable energy, and waste-to-resource systems to form an almost entirely self-sustaining, closed-loop community.
But this isn’t your hippie aunt’s crunchy, off-the-grid living. Conducting the complicated system will be the “Village OS” software, which eventually will use AI to “optimize living conditions, energy use, and overall efficiency,” and even potentially communicate with other future ReGen Villages around the planet, Insider reports.
ReGen Village has run into a number of roadblocks since it was first announced — construction on the complex was originally slated to begin in 2017 but it has encountered zoning, permitting, and funding problems and its website says the company is “in [the] process of raising a Series-A round of investment” to build out the operating system to test in “pilot communities.” But if the Amsterdam location doesn’t work out, stay tuned; ReGen is a California-based company and it reports interest in the concept is high in the U.S., particularly the Northeast.
Would I live here?: I’m all for off-the-grid living but something about ReGen Villages feels a little … cult-y? Maybe it’s the all-seeing AI, or the active discouragement of owning a car while living in a rural area, but something about this whole scheme sounds like the starting premise of an Ari Aster film. I’ll keep my cell reception, thanks.
ReGen Villages - Index Award 2017 Finalistwww.youtube.com
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Screenshot/YouTube
A desert oil state might seem like an unlikely place for a sustainable city; in 2003, the United Arab Emirates had the highest ecological footprint per person of any nation (and it’s not much better now). But as part of a region-wide effort to convince the rest of the world that climate objectives are compatible with fossil fuels, the UAE is hosting COP28 and touting lofty goals like making Dubai the city with the smallest carbon footprint in the world by 2050.
The 120-acre, $354 million Sustainable City is one of the crown jewels of that ongoing effort. Constructed 18 miles in the desert outside of Dubai by Diamond Developers, which built the city’s famous marina, the Sustainable City is intended as a model net-zero neighborhood, complete with self-sufficient greenhouses and biodomes, recycled water, solar panels, and intelligent design (the villas, home to some 2,500 residents, all face north, which the developers claim cuts air conditioning usage by 40%). Cars are banned inside the compound and a shopping plaza, complete with a mosque, serves all the residents’ needs.
Critics are highly skeptical of the Sustainable City, arguing the project is an “‘island’ of specialized consumption and lifestyle … that does not actually take on the challenge of sustainability.” Supporters, on the other hand, describe it as a “living laboratory” where developers are learning in real-time how to make habitable one of the most climate-threatened places on Earth. True, the Sustainable City might not be the solution to Dubai’s problems — at worst, it might represent another instance of the UAE’s greenwashing. But if its experiment is successful, the solutions it discovers could help inform better-living for everyone.
Would I live here?:There is a reason most of the homes on this list are variations on high-density living; dense urban housing tends to be far more energy efficient. While having your own villa in the Sustainable City would be pretty sweet, it does give the impression that this is just another gated community surrounded by all the other gated communities also touting their green bona fides in Dubai. On top of the human rights violations I’d have to turn a blind eye to in order to live in the United Arab Emirates, I’m not sure the Sustainable City would be right for me.
Sustainable City | Fully Chargedwww.youtube.comSc
Location: Austin, Texas
Screenshot/YouTube
Bringing people in closer harmony with the Earth is the goal of many sustainable communities. Whisper Valley, a 2,000-acre development in Austin, just takes it a little more literally.
At first, Whisper Valley looks like many innovative developments popping up across America: The 7,700 homes come with solar panels, Google Nest thermostats, nearby community centers, and ample public green spaces (in this case, a massive 600-acre park that doubles as flood control). But what sets the community apart is what you can’t see: Whisper Valley sits on the largest geothermal grid in the world.
Drawing on the steady temperature of the deep Earth, geothermal is gaining popularity as a means of slashing energy costs and emissions associated with heating and cooling homes. In combination with solar panels, monthly energy bills in Whisper Valley run residents only about one dollar.
But the low energy impact and savings are not the only things that make Whisper Valley a model neighborhood for the future. Because of its reliance on geothermal energy, the community had no problem staying warm when a 2021 energy surge during the deadly Texas Snowpocalypse left millions of people without heat for days. “As extreme weather gets more destructive,” Fast Company writes, geothermal solutions like that in Whisper Valley may be “a way for communities to withstand their own version of Snowpocalypse.”
Would I live here?: The suburbanite in me loves a lot about Whisper Valley — the stand-alone energy-efficient homes, the communal gathering spaces, the emphasis on healthy outdoor-oriented lifestyles, and the charging stations that come already installed in the garages. For most Americans, the development likely represents a feasible way to lower the family footprint while not compromising on many of the things we’ve come to take for granted, such as having our own space and the freedom that comes with owning a car. As far as daydreams go, Whisper Valley is perhaps a little underwhelming compared to living in a sky-forest or a luxury villa. But in terms of places that real Americans might actually be convinced to live, Whisper Valley is as exciting as it gets.
Whisper Valley - East Austin's New Zero-Energy Capable Communitywww.youtube.com
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SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk and traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”
On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”