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As Republicans’ budget priorities stack up, the numbers are starting to turn against America’s landmark climate law.
These are the 10 most important clean energy transition projects struggling to get off the ground
The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
On the WMO’s latest report, EPA climate grants, and BYD
Current conditions: More than 2 million people are under blizzard warnings across the Midwest • A landslide is suspected of rupturing an oil pipeline in northwest Ecuador, triggering an environmental emergency • Beaches are closed in South Australia due to a dangerous microalgal bloom, which officials believe could be caused by the combination of unusual hot and dry weather, low wind, and low tides.
A U.S. district judge issued a temporary restraining order yesterday blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from taking back billions of dollars in climate grants issued to a handful of nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Under the order, Citibank, where the funds are held, cannot transfer the money out of the nonprofits’ accounts because doing so would cause them “imminent harm.” The nonprofits in question – Climate United Fund, Coalition for Green Capital, and Power Forward Communities – received about $14 billion of more than $20 billion awarded for clean energy and climate solutions. The Trump administration’s EPA, led by Lee Zeldin, has frozen and attempted to claw back the funds, accusing the Biden administration of approving them hastily and without oversight, and accusing the nonprofits of “fraud, waste, and abuse.” Several of the grantees have sued the EPA and Citibank. In her decision, Judge Tanya Chutkan of Washington, D.C., said “there are serious due process concerns” about the EPA’s actions.
The World Meteorological Organization’s annual “State of the Global Climate” report is out today. It’s packed full of numbers from 2024 that tell an alarming story:
“WMO and the global community are intensifying efforts to strengthen early warning systems and climate services to help decision-makers and society at large be more resilient to extreme weather and climate,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “We are making progress but need to go further and need to go faster. Only half of all countries worldwide have adequate early warning systems. This must change.”
The Science Based Targets initiative, an influential nonprofit authority on best practices for corporate sustainability, published a draft proposal for its revised Net Zero Standard yesterday. It “requires that net-zero targets across all scopes (1, 2 and 3) be aligned with pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot.” In other words, companies that want an SBTi seal of approval can’t abandon the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, even as the world comes off its first year of average global temperatures above this threshold. “The finance industry is already abandoning voluntary initiatives intended to align their businesses with 1.5C,” notedBloomberg, “with the Net-Zero Banking Alliance now virtually wiped off the map in North America.”
Companies were hoping the new standard would give direction as to whether they should be buying carbon removal in the near-term. But as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains, in the section on carbon removal, SBTi described several potential approaches, none of which appears to be particularly ambitious. Feedback on the draft is due by June 1, after which the group’s technical department and expert working groups will refine it. SBTi expects companies to begin using the new standard to refine their targets in 2027.
A court has dismissed a legal challenge against New York City’s Local Law 154, which sets strict carbon dioxide limits that effectively ban fossil fuel-based space heating, hot water systems, cooking ranges, and clothes dryers in new buildings and buildings being gutted for renovation. Some industry groups and a plumber labor union challenged the law, claiming it “preempted” national energy-efficiency standards. The court disagreed, finding the law “regulates, indirectly, the type of fuel that a covered product may consume in certain settings, irrespective of that product’s energy efficiency or use.”
“This ruling is a major victory for local democracy and New York City residents who deserve healthy air and climate protection,” said Daniel Carpenter-Gold, staff attorney on the Climate Justice Team at the Public Health Law Center. “The court has affirmed that cities have the legal authority to address the use of fossil fuels in buildings, a major contributor to both climate change and air pollution.”
Chinese auto giant BYD claims to have developed technology that can charge an electric vehicle for 250 miles of range in just five minutes, or about the same amount of time it takes to fill up a gas-powered car. The Super e-Platform “can achieve a charging power of one megawatt and a peak charging speed of two kilometers per second,” Bloombergexplained, “making it the fastest system of its type for mass-produced vehicles.” The claims boosted the company’s shares on Tuesday. Over the last year, the Tesla rival’s stock has gained 85%.
The area of land covered by monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico this year has doubled compared to 2024, indicating a possible rebound for the iconic insects.
Rob quizzes Jesse on the latest research from the REPEAT Project.
Republicans in Washington are pushing for at least two big changes to the country’s car-related policies. In Congress, some lawmakers want to repeal the $7,500 tax credit that helps consumers buy or lease a new electric vehicle — as well as a matching tax credit that lets companies buy heavy-duty zero-carbon trucks. And at the Environmental Protection Agency, officials are trying to roll back Biden-era rules encouraging dealerships to sell more EVs through 2032.
What will that mean for the climate — and for the slate of new EV and battery factories popping up around the country? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about new research from Jesse’s lab, the REPEAT Project, about what will happen if Congress and the Trump administration get their way. What will happen to America’s factory boom? How soon would the effects be felt? And would tariffs stem the bleeding at all? Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: What surprised me, I think, is that even some of the existing capacity that is already operating now, or in the case of battery cells, this huge amount of additional capacity that’s going to be coming online this year, in 2025, could also be unnecessary. And so we found just if you take the cells, for example, that even if the U.S. were to maintain the same market share as it has today — which is about 70%, which is higher than the typical share of content in the auto sector as a whole …
Robinson Meyer: The EV supply chain is more U.S.-based than the general internal combustion vehicle supply chain. Like, a greater share of EVs are produced in the U.S. than a share of overall vehicles.
Jenkins: Yeah, I think it’s about a 70% share for EVs and only about a 50% share for —
Meyer: How much of that is Tesla, right?
Jenkins: Well, yeah, half of the 70% is Tesla. So even if we just maintain that same 70% share and just see the effect of the contraction in the market, we would have more capacity for battery cell assembly online by the end of this year than we would need.
Meyer: Yeah, wow.
Jenkins: And that’s assuming no decline in U.S. share if we lose the 30D requirements to source these batteries from North America. And so, if you assume instead that we only produce the same amount as we currently do, so we don’t see any new investment …
Meyer: That there’s no offshoring.
Jenkins: Then we don’t even need the factories that are opening this year. We have enough capacity already online, 130 gigawatt hours a year. We would only need about 120 in that low-end scenario. So even existing plants could be at risk. And the same is true for the assembly of vehicles. Up to half of the currently operating vehicle assembly capacity for EVs and plug-in hybrids in the U.S. could also be at risk. Those plants would either be idled or even potentially closed in that market contraction scenario, where both effects hit the EV assembly, the decline of 40% in sales and a contraction in U.S. market share.
Meyer: So in other words, the quickest way to close U.S. car factories is to repeal the tax credits in the IRA and the EPA regulations on greenhouse gas pollution.
Jenkins: I hesitate to say the quickest, I’m sure there are other terrible things. But yes.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
