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Current conditions: Hundreds of flood warnings are in effect for the U.K. • Schools in Cape Town will reopen after the passage of a severe storm • The weather will be “relatively quiet” across most of the U.S. for the next couple of days.
March was the 10th consecutive month of record-high temperatures on Earth, Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported today. The global average temperature for the month was 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 3 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial March average. Over the last 12 months, global temperatures have been 1.58 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial averages, above the 1.5 Celsius warming threshold scientists worry could trigger dramatic and irreversible climate damage. Sea surface temperatures also remained alarmingly high, averaging 69.93 degrees Fahrenheit, “the highest monthly value on record.”
C3S
C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess didn’t mince words: “Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist Jennifer Francis echoed that sentiment: “The trajectory will not change until concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop rising, which means we must stop burning fossil fuels, stop deforestation, and grow our food more sustainably as quickly as possible.”
The European Court of Human Rights handed down a landmark decision this morning that could ramp up legal pressure on governments to do more to limit global warming. The lawsuit was brought by a group of more than 2,000 older Swiss women who argued Switzerland had violated their human rights by failing to do its part to stop climate change. Older women are more likely to die from extreme heat, and the group said they suffer severely during Swiss heatwaves. The court agreed with them, saying Switzerland hadn’t done enough to meet its emissions reduction targets. The verdict “opens up all 46 members of the Council of Europe to similar cases in national courts that they are likely to lose,” explainedThe Guardian. “We expect this ruling to influence climate action and climate litigation across Europe and far beyond,” said Joie Chowdhury, an attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law campaign group. The case was one of three climate suits the court was considering – it threw out the other two.
Zurich Insurance Group will stop underwriting new oil and gas projects in pursuit of reaching net zero by 2050, Bloombergreported. The insurer will also pressure its existing corporate clients to curb emissions. “Further exploration and development of fossil fuels isn’t required for the transition,” Sierra Signorelli, chief executive of commercial insurance at Zurich, told Bloomberg. “We think it’s the right time to evolve our position.” The insurer says the policy shift only applies to new oil and gas projects and not existing ones. It will urge all oil and gas customers to set interim emissions targets and put together 2050 net zero plans that are credible, “not just a PowerPoint presentation.”
Tesla reached a settlement with the family of a man who was killed in a 2018 car crash involving the company’s Autopilot feature. The wrongful death lawsuit was set to go to trial this week. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. This isn’t the only lawsuit Tesla faces over its Autopilot driver assistance technology. “Every plaintiff’s lawyer that has one of these cases will be watching,” Matthew Wansley, associate professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, said before the settlement was announced. “I think Tesla didn’t want all the bad publicity and all the information that would have come out of the trial,” wrote Fred Lambert at Electrek.
Antarctica is pockmarked with meteorites: More than 60% of all these small space rocks ever discovered on Earth have been found on the ice sheet, with about 1,000 collected each year for the last decade. Meteorites are valuable scientific resources, offering researchers a wealth of information about our solar system. But a new paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change explains that warmer temperatures brought on by climate change are causing the meteorites to sink into the ice sheet, where they are lost to science.
Scientists carve out a meteorite submerged in the ice.Steven Goderis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
José Jorquera (Antarctica.cl), University of Santiago, Chile.
The study estimates the ice surface contains between 300,000 and 850,000 meteorites waiting to be collected, but says 24% of them will be lost by 2050 under current warming conditions, and for every tenth of a degree of increase in global air temperature, an average of nearly 9,000 meteorites will disappear. “The loss of Antarctic meteorites is much like the loss of data that scientists glean from ice cores collected from vanishing glaciers,” said Harry Zekollari, a co-author on the study. “Once they disappear, so do some of the secrets of the universe.”
Keegan Barber/NASA via Getty Images
“The eclipse is a really cool celestial event that hopefully can inspire people to see that there’s a lot of beauty in this universe. I hope it can inspire people to protect what we have.” –Michael Greenberg, co-founder of Climate Defiance
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Much may depend on the Senate’s tolerance for fuzzy math.
House Republicans passed a budget blueprint Thursday morning that lays the groundwork for the party to begin drafting legislation to enact President Trump’s agenda. Now the fight over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits begins in earnest.
The blueprint is merely a set of instructions for writing the eventual budget bill, laying out topline numbers for tax cuts and spending reductions — it doesn’t contain any actual policies. Trump’s biggest priorities are to extend the tax cuts he enacted in 2017, pass new tax cuts on tips and overtime pay, and to boost spending on immigration control and defense.
The resolution that Republicans passed allows for all of the above. In total, it enables Congress to craft a bill that would increase the national debt over the next decade by more than $5 trillion.
The good news for the IRA tax credits is that the framework only requires lawmakers to craft legislation that would produce $4 billion in savings. The bad news is that Senate Republicans have given their word to budget hawks in the House that they will aim to produce a minimum $1.5 trillion in savings. House Republicans are eager to find at least $2 trillion in deficit reductions.
According to a “menu” of budget proposals that made its way around the Hill earlier this year, Republicans estimate they could save anywhere from $3 billion to $800 billion by repealing IRA tax credits, depending on how many and which ones survive.
Lawmakers could also go after other climate-related policies, like cutting grant programs from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency. “Most of the funds have been obligated,” meaning they’re legally committed to grantees, “so there’s not much left to rescind,” Alex McDonough, a lobbyist with Pioneer Public Affairs, told me in an email. “We’ll see what they do with a possible rescission package, but even that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions they want for offsetting tax cuts.”
Lobbyists on Capitol Hill and other experts I’ve spoken with over the past two weeks disagree about how much the numbers matter when it comes to whether and how much of the IRA will be repealed. Some felt the budget math would take priority, while others told me that if any of the tax credits were killed or saved, it would be for political reasons over anything else.
Though the electric vehicle tax credits have been the most loudly targeted by Trump and Republicans, “anything with a price tag is at least somewhat vulnerable,” McDonough said. Lawmakers could also opt to make them more difficult to access or phase them out earlier rather than fully repeal them.
McDonough also said that the lobbying companies and trade groups have been doing around the manufacturing and clean electricity tax credits appeared to be working, and will ratchet up even more in May. “Appealing to ‘all of the above’ and ‘energy dominance’ is working because everyone knows how badly we need new generation to meet rapidly rising demand and a lot of the clean energy resources happen to be the quickest to deploy,” he said. “Utilities want it too, which is also very important.”
On Thursday, Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and John Curtis of Utah sent a letter to their party’s leadership asking them to preserve tax credits that spur manufacturing, reduce energy costs for consumers, and give certainty to businesses that have already made investments in the U.S. based on the credits. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Jerry Moran of Kansas also signed the letter. It was the first major show of support for the tax credits in the Senate, following a similar letter signed by 21 Republicans in the House.
Republicans are trying to enact Trump’s agenda using a special process called budget reconciliation, which will enable them to pass it with a simple 51-vote majority rather than the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster. The party currently has 53 seats, so four Republicans coming out in favor of preserving IRA tax credits is a good sign for the law. Similarly, the Republicans have a seven-seat majority in the House, and so those 21 who like the IRA could have quite a bit of influence.
But the other big open question for the future of the IRA — and frankly, for the future of the Senate — is whether Republicans will proceed with the fuzzy math they are using to calculate the cost of the bill. When the Congressional Budget Office scores the tax cuts, it will use what's called a "current law baseline," and estimate that they will cost the government more than $3 trillion dollars over the next ten years. Senate Republicans, however, have asserted that extending the 2017 tax cuts is free and will have no impact on the deficit, using a different scoring method called a “current policy baseline.”
The reason this matters for the IRA is that the budget reconciliation process has strict rules. If lawmakers were forced to recognize the true cost of the tax cut extensions in drafting the budget bill, they would have to make several trillion dollars’ worth of additional spending cuts in order to align with the blueprint they passed this week. In that scenario, it’s hard to see how any of the IRA could survive.
But if Republicans unify around this fuzzy math and carry it all the way to the final vote on the bill, which would be unprecedented, they could face a showdown with Democrats, who will say the bill doesn’t comply with the reconciliation rules. In that scenario, they’ll be faced with a choice either to go back to the drawing board or take the nuclear option — essentially changing how the Senate operates.
“There will be a majority vote on whether the Senate wants to change its precedents going forward, forever, and basically open up reconciliation to whatever policies the majority wants to enact going forward,” Charlie Ellsworth, another lobbyist for Pioneer Public Affairs, told me.
Expect to hear a lot more about this debate over the cost of the tax cuts once lawmakers return to Washington on April 28 after a two-week recess. Republicans have said they want to get the budget bill to Trump’s desk by Memorial Day. McDonough doesn’t think that’s in the cards, and expects it to happen by the August recess at best. But he expects the House Ways and Means committee to push out a first version of the bill in May, so we’ll see what the first proposal is for the fate of the IRA tax credits then.
More than 2,500 employees have applied for a buyout program. The departures, if approved, could gut the agency’s in-house bank and manufacturing office.
The Trump administration is overseeing a chaotic set of changes at the U.S. Department of Energy that could gut its in-house bank and transform one of the government’s key scientific and technology development agencies.
In the coming days, the department could see thousands of its employees — nearly one-fifth of its staff — resign in one of the largest headcount reductions in memory. At the same time, it could cancel billions of dollars in next-generation energy R&D projects in Ohio and other states.
Some of these changes have been planned for weeks. But in recent days, department officials have appeared to grow anxious behind the scenes about the scale of the transformation. Some Trump officials have reached out to individuals, offering them financial incentives in order to discourage them from taking the buyout, according to administration documents and accounts from multiple department employees who were not authorized to speak publicly.
If the full set of changes goes through, then the Department of Energy may be so depleted that it will be unable to carry out the Trump administration’s goals, such as bolstering the power grid or building new power plants.
The upheaval is a result of two policies coming to a head: the department’s “deferred resignation program,” which offers federal employees the equivalent of a severance deal to stop working immediately; and an internal effort to cancel or hinder major industrial policy projects initiated by the Biden administration.
It also arises from agency workers’ confusion and fear over who will ultimately make personnel decisions at the Energy Department, the agency’s own leadership or employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
In a statement, an Energy Department spokesperson said the agency was acting in accordance with the president’s executive order creating the government efficiency department.
“The Department of Energy is conducting a department-wide review of its organizational structures to ensure operations are best positioned to accomplish the DOE mission and align with the Trump administration’s priorities,” Andrea Woods, the spokesperson, said. “No final decisions have been made and multiple plans are still being considered.”
The deferred resignation program, which was started by Musk earlier this year, allows employees to resign immediately but receive full pay and benefits through the end of September.
When the resignation program was first made available in February, relatively few department employees took the offer, which resembles a buyout. Many were unsure that they would actually get paid if they accepted the deal.
But employees who took that deal have been getting paid — and at the end of March, Energy Secretary Chris Wright reopened the program and encouraged more employees to accept the resignation deal. He warned that President Donald Trump had ordered the department to conduct a mass “reduction in force” and said that accepting the buyout now could “mitigate the effect of potential involuntary separations.”
This time, the response has been very different. More than 2,700 Energy Department employees have applied for the voluntary resignation program, according to multiple employees who weren’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly. The department recently extended the program’s deadline to this Friday.
If those resignations are accepted, they could reduce the department’s head count by as much as 17%. More resignations are anticipated before the final deadline. The Department of Energy had 15,795 full-time employees as of last year, according to government data.
Some offices have been harder hit than others. The agency’s in-house bank, the Loan Programs Office, could lose half its permanent employees, according to one person who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly. Analysts have said that the office is essential to countering the low-cost loans that China gives its industrial firms.
Other offices — including those meant to bolster domestic manufacturing and strengthen the power grid — could also lose as much as half their permanent staff.
Many of these cuts are so deep that they could damage the agency’s ability to implement Trump’s agenda. The president has spoken about supporting the nuclear, natural gas, and coal industries — as well as spurring a new mining boom — but he will struggle to meet these goals if the agency is understaffed. The Office of Policy, which directly supports the administration’s agenda, is likely to lose dozens of staff to the program.
Some department leaders have seemingly realized that they may soon manage empty rooms. In some offices, Trump appointees have offered promotions or retention bonuses to career staff to discourage them from leaving, according to employees who weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The bonuses can run to as much as 25% of an employee’s annual salary, according to an internal email reviewed by Heatmap.
But many employees are worried that a coming round of layoffs led by the Department of Government Efficiency could override the preferences of the Energy Department’s own officials, terminating even favored employees. The Musk-led efficiency department hopes to cut more than half of the loan office’s full-time staff, according to one individual. It has placed commissars inside most federal agency buildings, including the Energy Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Woods, the Energy Department spokesperson, declined to comment on the number of employees who have applied for the resignation program because it is still open for applications. The department will review and approve each resignation request individually, she said, and it will retain employees working in “public safety, national security, law enforcement” and other “essential” roles.
Yet it is possible to estimate the number of employees who have asked to resign because the department creates a numbered receipt for each employee who enrolls in the program. The numbers, which have increased sequentially, now exceed 2,700, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the receipts who aren’t authorized to speak publicly.
The resignation turmoil comes as the agency considers making other big changes to its policies. Trump officials are in the process of reviewing more than 30 advanced energy demonstration projects slated to be built nationwide, according to documents obtained by Heatmap News. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act spent more than $6 billion to fund demonstration programs focused on carbon capture, clean hydrogen, and re-industrialization.
CNN reported this week that one of the projects on the chopping block is a $500 million grant to build a next-generation steel mill in Middletown, Ohio — the hometown of Vice President JD Vance.
The Energy Department has already been experimenting with revoking contracts that the government had previously signed. It remains unclear whether the department can suspend these contracts legally.
Last week, China announced more than 100 new industrial-scale demonstration projects to support clean steel production and carbon capture. The country created 47 new advanced energy demonstration projects last year.
On the National Climate Assessment, data centers, and tornadoes
Current conditions: Californians who live near the site of January’s devastating Los Angeles wildfires are being urged to get tested for lead poisoning • The Ohio River in waterlogged Louisville, Kentucky, crested at 37 feet on Wednesday • It will be about 60 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Brussels today, where European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU is pausing its retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. for 90 days following a similar move from President Trump.
1. Trump takes aim at national climate report
The Trump administration is making moves to gut the program responsible for compiling the National Climate Assessment, a report published every four years examining how climate change is affecting the United States that helps shape government response. The administration is reportedly canceling contracts with the consulting firm that provides most of the staff for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the federal group responsible for coordinating the report across agencies. The report is required by Congress, but “it’s hard to see how they’re going to put out a National Climate Assessment now,” Donald Wuebbles, a professor in the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois who has been involved in past climate assessments, toldThe New York Times.
2. IEA: Electricity consumption from data centers to double by 2030
The International Energy Agency published a big report Thursday on how the rise of artificial intelligence will affect energy demand over the next five years. The analysis finds that global electricity consumption from the data centers that power AI will more than double by 2030, and that the U.S. will be the key driver of this growth. “By the end of the decade, the country is set to consume more electricity for data centers than for the production of aluminium, steel, cement, chemicals, and all other energy-intensive goods combined,” the report said. Other key findings as they related to energy and climate:
IEA
3. This year’s tornado reports are off the charts
We’re less than four months into 2025, but already there have been way more tornadoes in the U.S. than what’s considered normal, according to AccuWeather. More than 470 tornadoes have been reported since the start of the year, compared to the historical average of roughly 260. “The frequency and severity of extreme weather in America this year has been alarming,” said Dan DePodwin, AccuWeather’s senior director of forecasting operations. Just two other years in the 16-year record had more tornadoes reported by this time in the season. Tornadoes were reported every day from March 26 through April 7. “A 12-day streak might be typical in May, which is the peak of tornado activity, but it is uncommon for March and early April,” AccuWeather said in a press release.
AccuWeather
4. Trump to New York: End congestion pricing, or else
President Trump’s Department of Transportation escalated its threat this week to retaliate against New York if the state’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, does not shut down congestion pricing by April 20. The tolling program, which charges a $9 fee for drivers who enter New York City’s central business district, has only been in effect for three months.
“Make no mistake — the Trump Administration and USDOT will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal in response to non-compliance later this month,” the agency said in a social media post. The post did not say what those tools might be, but a previous post from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on March 20 made a veiled threat to withhold funding from the state if it did not shut down the tolling program. “The billions of dollars the federal government sends to New York are not a blank check,” he said. Duffy notified the MTA on February 19 that he was rescinding federal approval of its congestion pricing program, despite early evidence that it was reducing traffic. The MTA immediately filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging Duffy’s actions.
5. Tapestry and PJM partner on AI for the interconnection queue
Google X’s Tapestry project, which focuses on innovations for the electric grid, and grid operator PJM on Thursday announced a partnership that will use artificial intelligence to develop a unified model of the grid’s electricity network. The model will bring in data from dozens of disparate tools into one simplified “Google Maps for electrons,” Page Crahan, Tapestry’s general manager, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. The model will give grid operators and project developers the ability to toggle on and off different layers of grid information — a vast improvement over the technical boondoggle grid planners face today. PJM is facing a slew of retiring fossil fuel resources just as electricity demand is ramping up, largely thanks to AI data centers. Meanwhile, PJM has a years-long waitlist full of wind and solar projects seeking permission to connect to the grid that are languishing in no small part due to its slow approval process. Tapestry plans to deliver solutions that PJM can start rolling out this year. The two entities will work together to develop new processes “over the next several quarters “ and “perhaps even the next several years,” Crahan said.
The largest data center currently under construction could consume as much electricity as 2 million households.