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Hell is shopping for eco poop bags.
As much as I’m aware that blaming the climate crisis on individual consumer choices is a favorite smokescreen of large corporations and fossil fuel companies, it still totally kills me to buy single-use plastic bags. So when my household recently ran out of the 900 black disposable litter bags we’d bought on Wirecutter’s recommendation eons ago, I decided to be a Good Person and replace them with the most environmentally friendly option I could find. I mean, how hard could it be?
Hoo boy.
What started out as a naïve quest to find the greenest pet waste receptacle has become my Joker origin story. It’s turned me into Mark Ruffalo in Dark Water, except instead of taking on Dupont, I’m hounding companies with names like The Original Poop Bag and Doggy Do Good for the chemical makeup of their “green” bags. I’ve been red-pilled on advanced recycling. And, worst of all, I still haven’t actually bought a replacement — because the entire “green,” “biodegradable,” “plant-based,” “compostable” pet waste bag industry is built on misdirections, half-truths, and outright lies.
This might seem like a ridiculous thing to have spent my time obsessing over (and I don’t entirely disagree with you). But the greenwashing and obfuscation around these bags is part of a bigger story. Plastics are the fossil fuel industry’s last stand. The renewable energy transition, albeit in fits and starts, is here. Seeing the writing on the wall, companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are heavily investing in petrochemicals, which are used to make plastic and are expected to make up half of oil demand growth between now and 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). As Armco president and CEO Amin Nasser has reassured his cohorts, oil demand from petrochemicals is expected to remain high “no matter which energy transition scenario plays out.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This story starts with much cuter villains: my cats.
Meet the adorable antiheroes of this story, Marinka and Virginia:
This whole piece is just an excuse to show you a picture of my cats.Jeva Lange/Heatmap
These two cutie pies don’t know it, but they diligently contribute to the 5.1 million tons of feces produced by America’s dogs and cats every year. One estimate of the dog sector alone found that disposing of all that waste adds some 500 million single-use bags to U.S. landfills annually.
The evils of single-use plastic bags have already been drilled into most of our heads by now: They take years to break down and when they do, they don’t decompose but rather turn into tiny microplastics that end up in the soil, waterways, food chain, and even our bloodstreams and breast milk. There is one seemingly great and trendy way to get around this: compostable bags!
Alas, if something sounds too good to be true, it is. For one thing, the “compostable” claims made by eco-friendly pet companies are wildly misleading. Though brands like to imply that their bags decompose and disappear like any other yard waste, these products only break down within a year under the extremely specific conditions of a commercial composting facility — very, very few of which even accept pet waste in the first place. As a result, the FTC has flagged that “compostable claims for these products are generally untrue.”
A "compostable" poop bag available on Chewy.com...Chewy.com
...and why you should always read the fine print.Chewy.com
Companies love to exploit consumers’ lack of knowledge around these terms and processes, though, and are mostly free to do so since the language isn’t strongly regulated. Often brands will brag that their compostable bags meet the “ASTM D6400 standard,” which just means they meet the industrial composting standard — again, pretty useless for us in this context. (Touting the ASTM D6400 standard is also often a way for brands to hide that their bags are made with virgin fossil fuels … more on that soon).
The bigger question when it comes to composting pet waste is, do we even want to? Dogs and cats are meat eaters, which means their poop contains parasites and bacteria like roundworms and hookworms, which can last for years in the soil and even be passed onto humans if used as a fertilizer for edible plants. While maybe this doesn’t sound like it could be that big of a problem, it is: “A study by the Bureau of Sanitation found that 60% of the bacteria in a Marina Del Rey, [California,] waterway was because of animals, domesticated and feral,” the Los Angeles Times reports. Gross.
This is one time you’ll ever hear me say that dog people have it better, though. Done correctly, dog owners actually can home compost dog waste if they’re so inclined. That said, a major downside of compostable bags is that they seem to lead some people to the impression that they can litter trails and parks with their “green” bags since the bags will eventually “go away.” As previously discussed: No, they won’t.
Cat waste, however, never basically should end up in your garden: Felines carry the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can be passed onto humans via compost but has been found to kill wildlife, including the sea otters in California. “Toxoplasma infections contribute to the deaths of 8 percent of otters that are found dead, and is the primary cause of death in 3 percent,” The New York Times explains. While feral cats used to be blamed for spreading the parasite, new evidence shows house cats almost certainly are, too — through their waste.
So compostable pet waste bags are out. As one municipality put it, dog and cat poop should be treated like what it is: not a fertilizer, but a pollutant. That means it needs to be sequestered, one way or another, in a landfill.
Just going to nip this one in the bud. For the same reason that composting pet waste isn’t advisable due to parasites and bacteria in four-legged meat-eaters’ feces, flushable pet waste bags and litter aren’t a safe or responsible choice, either.
Many waste treatment facilities don’t kill Toxoplasma, so putting cat poop in the toilet just expedites its journey into your local waterway. Indeed, in responding to an utterly unhinged email I sent them about cat waste, the California Association of Sanitation Agencies confirmed that “the only thing that should be flushed is human waste and toilet paper.”
Biodegradable pet waste bags are what radicalized me.
At first glance, these bags appear to be the best option. A number of them come on the recommendation of the sustainability website Treehugger. The product websites usually feature blogs full of reassuring information about how harmful plastic waste is, or boast 1% for the Planet certifications, or mention something about being made of cornstarch. Even the bags are green!
And almost all of them, despite their lofty claims, are made using virgin fossil fuels.
Polybutylene Adipate Terephthalate, or “PBAT,” is a biodegradable plastic made from the petrochemicals butanediol, purified terephthalic acid (PTA), and adipic acid. Translation: Fossil fuels must be extracted in order to make any bag that contains PBAT, which is virtually all of them.
Companies are exceptionally sneaky about this, though. Some of the brands boast outright about using PBAT as a traditional plastic alternative, likely assuming customers have no idea what the acronym means and won’t bother looking it up. Yet as Alice Judge, a former veterinarian and co-founder of the U.K.-based sustainable pet website Pet Impact, found in her own investigation, PBAT rarely makes up less than 60% of these supposedly “plant-based” pet waste bags. “There is some really concerning greenwashing and outright lying” going on in the industry, she told me. “We’ve found brands that are very big, reputable brands even saying explicitly ‘100% plant-based’ and in the same sentence saying ‘made from cornstarch and PBAT.’”
"Zero plastic" — but contains a fossil fuel-derived chemical called PBAT.Sirwaggingtons.com
PBAT is typically combined with cornstarch or sugarcane, so a “plant-based” bag advertising those ingredients can often be a tip-off that a fossil fuel product is also involved. Additionally, companies will frequently flag on their packaging that they meet the ASTM D6400 or BPI standards, though these have no provisions against certifying biodegradable products that contain PBAT.
Pet waste bag companies appear to go out of their way to avoid these admissions. Doggy Do Good, a popular sustainable pet waste company, told me in an email they use a “proprietary bio-based material” for “60.9% of the composition of their bags” — that is, the expected amount of PBAT — and added that “this fully biodegradable copolymer is an excellent alternative to polyethylene.” When I pressed to clarify if their proprietary “biodegradable copolymer” in question was PBAT, as I suspected, they stopped replying to my emails. The Original Poop Bag, another green bag company, didn’t answer me at all when I asked if their bags contained the fossil fuel product.
Despite these avoidance tactics, biodegradable bag companies aren’t using PBAT because they nefariously want to ruin the planet. It’s just the dirty secret of the pet waste bag business. As Judge explained in a blog post, “All poo bags have to include PBAT for strength and structure. If they were 100% plant-based, they would turn to mush very quickly when wet, lack strength, and tear easily (some qualities you really don’t want in a poo bag!).”
Fair enough. It’s the lack of transparency that is the problem: Most of these companies are selling fossil fuel-based products to customers who think they’re buying bags made from corn.
What's the other 62%?Doggydogood.com
Ultimately, there are two ways to think about the impact of the pet waste bags you buy: the impact of the materials used to make them and the impact of their disposal. If the latter is your biggest concern — what happens to bags after they’ve been used — biodegradable and “plant-based” bags are still probably the best, if imperfect, option available on the market. You can throw them in the trash (where they belong because again, pet poop is a pollutant) but also know at least that they’ll eventually biodegrade in a landfill (it should be noted, though, that everything is technically biodegradable, and the word means nothing without specification about the timeline and conditions).
From an “input” perspective — what the bags are made of, and how — biodegradable and “plant-based” bags are a little less exciting. They require less virgin fossil fuel than buying a bag entirely made out of traditional single-use plastic, though some research has suggested there is “no real difference in lifetime emissions between” products made with traditional plastic and those made from bioplastics. By another estimate, greenhouse gas emissions “are typically higher for bio-based plastics than recycled and virgin plastics” because “corn requires large amounts of energy, space, and water to grow industrially” and “turning the corn starch (once cultivated) into a polymer requires considerable energy.”
There is one major exception to all of this: Avoid “oxo-biodegradable” products. These are banned in the EU because they break down, sure — but into toxic microplastics.
Though they’re comparatively rare, you can find “recycled plastic” pet waste bags on the market. They apparently cut down on virgin fossil fuels by recycling plastic that’s already been extracted. (Judge’s company, Pet Impact, sells its own poo bag made from recycled ocean plastic, oyster shell waste, and “about 25 to 30%” virgin fossil fuels).
Even 100% recycled materials have their problems.
But while recycled plastic sounds great, it has — you guessed it — its own complications.
“Chemical” or “advanced” plastic recycling is the current sweetheart of the oil and gas industry, despite evidence that recycling plastic isn’t nearly as good as it’s chalked up to be. For one thing, the process of converting old plastics into new plastics is incredibly emissions-intensive and thus requires the burning of fossil fuels to generate the required energy. The recycling process can also spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air that disproportionately poison low-income communities of color, like those in “Cancer Alley.”
This is a problem that stretches far beyond the humble poo bags: Hundreds of companies now sell everything from clothes to shoes to shampoo bottles on the boast that they’re made from recycled plastics. Yet “by feigning ‘recycling’ (really, downcycling) of plastic pollution, companies can divert attention from their role in perpetuating this crisis while pulling in profits,” stresses the advocacy group Plastic Pollution Coalition. Recycled plastic can be just another smokescreen when what’s really needed is a reduction of single-use plastics altogether.
But it was reducing single-use plastics that got me into this whole mess in the first place.
In March 2020, a month when nothing else of note was happening, New York City banned single-use carryout plastic bags, joining San Francisco and a number of other towns around the country. But like many pet owners, grocery store plastic bags had been our go-to litter scooping bags. As we became more conscious of single-use plastics in some parts of our lives, it led us to buy … a bunch of single-use plastics to use for our pets.
As the pandemic wore on, my husband and I eventually decided to fly across the country with Marinka and Virginia in order to be with our families. There, my stepmother introduced us to a revolutionary new poop bag. It didn’t require the extraction of any new fossil fuels, and while it doesn’t break down in a landfill, it also won’t poison any otters.
The name of this holy grail of poop bags? Trash.
Empty bread bags can become the perfect chutes for scoops of litter. Plastic packaging gets a second life as a final resting place for kitty unmentionables. Bags of dry cat food, once exhausted, can be refilled.
This isn’t a perfect solution, either (for example, “produce bags aren’t engineered to be particularly durable, nor to hold in liquids or odors,” Wirecutter warns with the confidence of experience). But if I’ve learned anything in this mad, scatological journey, it’s that there is no perfect solution. What satisfies one person’s environmental concerns — about greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel extraction, or waste and pollution — might not satisfy someone else’s. And at a certain point, you have to make a choice, and likely a compromise, and then move on to focusing on the things that make a bigger difference, like what you drive, where you get your power from, or what you eat.
All this is to say, the trash method works for me because it makes single-use plastics destined for the landfill anyway into twice-use plastics. And at least it allows me not to think about cat poop anymore.
I think I’ve done enough of that to last me a lifetime.
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On a billion-dollar mineral push, the north’s grim milestones, and EV charging’s comeback
Current conditions: The Southeastern U.S. is facing flash floods through the end of Thursday • Temperatures in Fez, Morocco, are forecast to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit • Wildfires continue to rage across southern Europe, sending what Spain’s environment minister called a “clear warning” of the effects of climate change.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday named David Rosner, a centrist Democrat, as the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Since joining the commission in June 2024, Rosner focused the panel on the nation’s growing electricity demand from data centers and pushed for greater automation of the engineering process to connect power plants to the continent’s various grid systems. “Getting grid interconnection moving faster is essential to ensuring reliability,” Rosner told E&E News in March. “We’re starting to learn about these new tools and platforms that just make this work faster, smarter, saves us time, solves the reliability and affordability problems that are facing the country.”
The Bipartisan Policy Center, where Rosner previously worked as a staffer, hailed his promotion as a positive step. “Chairman Rosner’s strong understanding of the energy challenges facing our country, and demonstrated record of bipartisan work to address those challenges, make him well-suited to carry out the responsibilities of FERC chairman,” David R. Hill, the executive vice president of the group’s energy program, said in a statement.
Lithium production in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the world's main sources.John Moore/Getty Images
The Energy Department announced at least $925 million in funding for five proposed programs to bolster the country’s domestic supply of minerals. “For too long, the United States has relied on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life and our national security,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release. “The Energy Department will play a leading role in reshoring the processing of critical materials and expanding our domestic supply of these indispensable resources.”
That funding includes:
The Trump administration has made bolstering America’s critical minerals industry one of its signature energy policy priorities. Though as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has written, it has also gone out of its way to annihilate sources of domestic demand for these minerals, especially in the wind energy and electric vehicle industries.
In Alaska, an overflowing glacial lake north of Juneau triggered the Mendenhall River to surge to a record height, flooding the state’s capital city. The problem has been growing for years as climate change in the nation’s most rapidly-warming state accelerates the volume of ice melt. In 2023, floodwaters eroded Mendenhall’s banks, causing homes to collapse, according to the Alaska Beacon. In 2024, the news outlet reported, “the flood was the worst yet.” The flood peaked Wednesday afternoon at nearly 17 feet, damaging hundreds of homes.
Across the border, meanwhile, the more than 700 active fires blazing in Canada have already made this the country’s second-worst fire season on record. The largest fire, the Shoe fire in Saskatchewan, has been burning across 1.4 million acres — an area larger than the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona — since May 7, The New York Times reported.
In an executive order on his first day back in office, Trump singled out the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, directing his Department of Transportation to pause and review the funding, with an eye toward cutting it entirely. Earlier this week, the Federal High Administration completed its review and issued a new guidance that, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday, “not only preserves it, but also purports to ‘streamline applications,’ ‘slash red tape,’ and ‘ensure charging stations are actually built.’”
“If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press release. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.” The statement, Emily noted, is out of sync with the administration’s other actions to throttle the adoption of EVs: “Only time will tell whether the new guidance is truly a win for EV charging, however. It’s a win in the sense that many EV advocates feared the agency would try to kill the program or insert poison pills into the guidance. But it’s unclear whether the changes will speed up NEVI deployment beyond what might have happened had it not been paused.”
A researcher has designed a new centimeter-square device that could help probe the “ignorosphere,” a layer of ultra-thin air that has largely escaped exploration by balloons, aircraft and satellites. The contraption uses technology similar to a weathervane encased in a low-pressure chamber that will spin when exposed to light. “You don’t really believe it until you see it,” Ben Schafer, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Nature.
President Trump has had it in for electric vehicle charging since day one. His January 20 executive order “Unleashing American Energy” singled out the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program by name, directing the Department of Transportation to pause and review the funding as part of his mission to “eliminate” the so-called “electric vehicle mandate.”
With the review now complete, the agency has concluded that canceling NEVI is not an option. In an ironic twist, the Federal Highway Administration issued new guidance for the program on Monday that not only preserves it, but also purports to “streamline applications,” “slash red tape,” and “ensure charging stations are actually built.”
“If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press release. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.”
Duffy’s statement stands in sharp contrast to the stance of other federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, which continue to block congressionally-mandated spending programs.
Only time will tell whether the new guidance is truly a win for EV charging, however. It’s a win in the sense that many EV advocates feared the agency would try to kill the program or insert poison pills into the guidance. But it’s unclear whether the changes will speed up NEVI deployment beyond what might have happened had it not been paused.
“The real story to me is the needless delay,” Joe Halso, a senior attorney for Sierra Club, told me. “They took six months to produce something that they could have done in an afternoon, and that didn’t require them to halt the program in the first place. Every day of that delay stalled critical EV charging projects.”
The goal of the NEVI program was to help states install charging stations in areas that the market, on its own, was not serving. States had to submit annual plans to the FHWA for how they would deploy the funds to fill gaps in regional EV charging networks. Once those plans are approved, states could issue requests for proposals from EV charging companies to build the new charging stations and award grants to help get them financed.
In February, Duffy issued a letter to state Departments of Transportation suspending approval of their plans for all fiscal years, pending forthcoming new guidance from the agency. That meant states would not be able to issue new awards, essentially freezing the program. At the time, the agency had approved state spending plans totaling more than $3.2 billion for fiscal years 2022 through 2025. Of that money, states had committed only about $526 million to specific projects.
In early May, 16 states plus the District of Columbia challenged the DOT’s actions in court, winning a preliminary injunction that prevented the agency from suspending or revoking their previously-approved plans. While the injunction unfroze the program in the plaintiff states, about $1.8 billion for the rest of the country was still locked up. But the judge allowed a coalition of national, regional, and community groups, including the Sierra Club, to become parties in the case and fight for the funding to be restored across the board. That means that if the plaintiffs are ultimately successful, the verdict will apply to every state, not just those 16 that filed the case.
The fact that the DOT issued new guidance this week doesn’t change anything about the case, Halso of the Sierra Club told me. The move could wind up delaying the program further.
“This new guidance prolongs the freeze by forcing states to resubmit already approved plans to access money they’re already entitled to,” Halso explained. “And we don’t know if or when federal highways will approve those plans and restore states’ access to money.” The guidance gives states 30 days to submit their plans, though it does allow them to simply re-submit previously-approved versions.
In Monday’s press release, Duffy declared the program’s implementation to date a “failure,” citing the fact that only 16% of the funds had been obligated so far. It’s true that the program has been slow in getting underway. As of this week, there are at least 106 NEVI-funded charging stations with 537 ports across 17 states, Loren McDonald, the chief analyst for the EV charging data analytics firm Paren, told me. That’s a long way off pace to achieve President Biden’s stated goal of installing 500,000 by 2030.
It’s also true that the new rules are simpler. The previous guidance, which was 30 pages long, contained more than five pages of detailed “considerations” states had to follow in developing their plans, which designated specific distances between chargers, required projects to mitigate adverse impacts to the electric grid, and mandated that States target “rural areas, underserved and overburdened communities, and disadvantaged communities,” among other rules. The new guidance, by contrast, is a tight seven pages devoid of almost any obligations not explicitly required by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which created the program.
Under the previous guidance, for example, NEVI-funded stations had to be built within one mile of a federally-designated EV corridor and at no greater than 50-mile increments along those corridors. The new guidance simply says that states should “consider the appropriate distance between stations to allow for reasonable travel and certainty that charging will be available to corridor travelers when needed.”
McDonald told me that some states had been frustrated with the 50-mile siting requirement and would likely welcome that change. NATSO and SIGMA, two industry associations that represent rest stops, travel centers, and fuel marketers, issued a joint statement praising the “flexible, consumer-oriented approach.” They also specifically applauded the guidance for encouraging states to prioritize projects that are built and operated by the site owner. Some NEVI projects were being developed by a third party, such as Tesla, which had to sign a long-term lease with the site owner, like a grocery store or hotel. These agreements took time to work out, and would sometimes fall apart, McDonald told me.
But from McDonald’s vantage point, what was slowing down the program most was the fact that every state had different requirements and a different process for soliciting and scoring proposals from developers. Also, while a few states already had previous experience administering EV charging grant programs, many lacked staff and expertise in the subject. “I don’t mean this the way it’s going to come out,” McDonald said. “But they barely knew how to spell EV charging. A lot of the state DOTs really just were about building roads and bridges, and they had never had to deal with any charging.”
The new DOT guidance doesn’t seek to address either of those issues. “I’m not seeing anything in here that’s going to lead to a significant reduction in time,” McDonald said. “It seems to sort of miss where the lengthy processes were.”
The Zero Emission Transportation Association, an industry group, had a more positive outlook. Research associate Corey Cantor told me the new guidance is “workable” for the industry and provides regulatory certainty. When I asked Cantor if the changes the agency made to the guidance would help get more money out the door, he said it “remains to be seen on the implementation side,” but that states had been asking for more flexibility.
Cantor emphasized that it was important for state DOTs to have regulatory certainty and to get the funds flowing again. “Charging anxiety, after the upfront cost of EVs, is one of the highest cited barriers for entry for new adopters of electric vehicles,” he said. “And so getting the charging network filled out is key to helping us move to this next stage of the transition.”
On Sierra Club drama, OBBB’s price hike, and deep-sea mining blowback
Current conditions: Tropical Erin is expected to gain strength and make landfall in the Caribbean as the first major hurricane of the season, lashing islands with winds of up to 80 miles per hour and 7 inches of rain • More than 152 fires have broken out across Greece in the past 24 hours alone as Europe battles a heatwave • Typhoon Podul is expected to make landfall over southeastern Taiwan on Wednesday morning, lashing the island with winds of up to 96 miles per hour.
The Department of Energy selected 11 nuclear projects from 10 reactor startups on Tuesday for a pilot program “with the goal to construct, operate, and achieve criticality of at least three test reactors” by next July 4. The Trump administration then plans to fast-track the successful technologies for commercial licensing. The effort is part of the United States’ attempt at catching up with China, which last year connected its first high-temperature gas-cooled reactor to the grid. The technologies in the program vary among the reactors selected for the program, with some reactors based on Generation IV designs using coolants other than water and others pitching smaller but otherwise traditional light water reactors. None of the selected models will produce more than 300 megawatts of power. The U.S. hopes these smaller machines can be mass produced to bring down the cost of nuclear construction and deploy atomic energy in more applications, including on remote military bases, and even, as NASA announced last week, the moon.
Here are the companies:
The Sierra Club terminated executive director Ben Jealous this week, ending a rocky tenure that culminated earlier this summer in votes of no confidence among statewide chapters, Inside Climate News’ Lee Hedgepeth reported. A former chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the 2018 Democratic nominee for Maryland governor, Jealous’ rise to the green group’s top job in November 2022 seemed like a watershed moment for what is arguably the nation's most prominent environmental groups. The first non-white leader of the 133-year-old organization promised to close the book on the Sierra Club’s internal wrestling with the racist legacy of its founder, John Muir.
But budget cuts, layoffs, and fights with the group’s union marred his time at the helm. In June, the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s Oregon Chapter voted unanimously to request a vote of no-confidence in Jealous from the national organization’s board, citing his hiring of a senior staff member who was registered as lobbyist for the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, The New York Times’ Claire Brown reported. Weeks later, the Missouri Chapter voted unanimously to make the same request. Allies on the board accused Jealous’ critics of a racist “pattern of misinformation, character assassination, and discrimination” against the first Black man to hold the top job. But the board placed Jealous on leave last month and, on Monday, said in a statement that it had “unanimously voted to terminate Ben Jealous’ employment for cause.”
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The price of power purchase agreements in the U.S. has increased by 4% on average since the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. That’s according to data released this morning by the industry group LevelTen Energy, which called the calculations “the clearest signal yet that the market has already begun to reprice in light of these new risks and headwinds.”
Of the 86 U.S. developers surveyed from the LevelTen Marketplace, 86% said “they are now adapting their approach — either by accelerating construction timelines, reprioritizing project pipelines, or both.” Next Monday, the Treasury Department is due to issue guidance for renewable energy projects accessing federal tax credits, following Trump’s executive order directing the Internal Revenue Service to place new restrictions on solar and wind developers. Industry groups have been “circling the wagons” since the orders release, according to Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo, bracing for restrictions that will push up prices for renewables.
The United States is the only major country that hasn’t ratified the United Nations’ 1994 Law of the Sea treaty. Yet the Trump administration has used the country’s “observer” status to push for finalizing a code under the UN-affiliated International Seabed Authority that would allow for permitting commercial mining on the ocean floor. Trump also signed an executive order in April to unilaterally license deep-sea mining if global rules don’t come into effect. At the center of the effort is the Canadian startup The Metals Company, which has designed special machines to harvest mineral-rich nodules on the deep-sea floor. The company and its backers say it’s a cleaner, faster way to increase global mineral supplies than opening more mines on land. But skeptics — including France and China — warn that the rush to industrialize one of the planet’s last untouched wildernesses risks harming fragile and scarcely understood ecosystems, and criticized Washington for threatening to go it alone without international regulations in place.
China was the first country to publicly condemn Trump’s order in April, but Brazil and Panama spoke at last month’s ISA meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, to express support for Beijing’s position, Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reported from the Caribbean capital.
The sweltering streets of Midtown Manhattan on July 29, 2025. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Great news for anyone who, like me, is getting increasingly spooked about microplastics: New research in the journal Sustainable Food Technology found that grapevine cane films could be a great alternative to petrochemical plastics. They’re transparent, leave behind no harmful residues, and biodegrade into soil within 17 days. “These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications,” Srinivas Janaswamy, an associate professor in South Dakota State University's Department of Dairy and Food Science, said in a press release. “That is my dream.”
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect the fact that, at the time of publication, Tropical Storm Erin was not yet a hurricane.