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Politics

What Biden’s Budget Proposal Says About Climate Projects

On the president’s funding requests, BYD’s bumpy road, and fake sand dunes

What Biden’s Budget Proposal Says About Climate Projects
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Tropical storm Filipo will make landfall on Mozambique’s coast today • Morel season has begun in parts of the Midwest • It is cold and cloudy in Stockholm, where police forcibly removed climate activst Greta Thunberg from the entrance to parliament.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Climate and energy ‘figure prominently’ in Biden’s budget

President Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget yesterday, and his “climate and energy promises figured prominently,” reported E&E News. Biden requested $17.8 billion for the Interior Department to help with climate resilience, national parks, wildfire management, tribal programs, ecosystem restoration, and water infrastructure in the west. He wants $11 billion for the EPA and $51 billion for the Department of Energy to tackle climate change and help fund the energy transition. The proposal calls for funding toward expanding the “Climate Corps.” Biden also asked Congress to put $500 million into the international Green Climate Fund in 2025, and then more in the following years. And he wants to make this spending mandatory. The budget would also “cut wasteful subsidies to Big Oil and other special interests,” Biden said. As Morning Brew noted, the budget proposal has “about as much chance of getting passed by Congress as a bill guaranteeing each American a pet unicorn, so it’s mostly a statement of Biden’s priorities.”

2. U.S. EV prices drop 13% year-over-year

EV prices in the U.S. have dropped by about 13% in the last year, according to Kelley Blue Book. The drop “has been led in part by the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, the two most popular EVs in the U.S.,” explained Michelle Lewis at Electrek. However, EVs are still more expensive than “mainstream non-luxury vehicles,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Industry Insights at Cox Automotive.

3. Report: BYD struggles to ramp up overseas EV sales

Chinese EV maker BYD has reportedly hit a speed bump on the road to international expansion. Having dominated the Chinese market and established itself as the top-selling EV maker in the world, BYD set an internal goal of selling 400,000 cars overseas this year. But a global slowdown in EV sales growth has hampered that effort, reported The Wall Street Journal. “As of the end of last year, more than 10,000 BYD passenger cars were waiting in warehouses in Europe,” the Journal added, “and the certificates authorizing them to be sold in the European Union are set to expire soon, meaning it may not be possible to sell them in Europe.” At the same time, quality control issues have been cropping up in some vehicles, and higher prices in Europe are making it more difficult for the company to compete with better-known brands.

4. U.K. emissions hit 145-year low

Greenhouse gas emissions in the UK fell last year to their lowest level since 1879, according to analysis from Carbon Brief. The decline is attributed mainly to a drop in gas demand thanks to higher electricity imports and warmer temperatures. As recently as 2014, the power sector was the UK’s largest source of emissions, but now it has been eclipsed by transportation, buildings, industry, and agriculture. “Transport emissions have barely changed over the past several decades as more efficient cars have been offset by increased traffic,” Carbon Brief explained. Remarkably, coal use in the country is at its lowest level since the 1730s, “when George II was on the throne.” The emissions drop is good news but “with only one coal-fired power station remaining and the power sector overall now likely only the fifth-largest contributor to UK emissions, the country will need to start cutting into gas power and looking to other sectors” to meet net zero by 2050. Meanwhile, the British government today announced a plan to build new gas plants.

5. Seaside town’s $500K new protective sand dune washes away in 3 days

Residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, last week finished building a $500,000 sand dune meant to protect their beachside homes from rising tides and repeated storms. Three days later, the barrier, made of 14,000 tons of sand, washed away when a storm brought historic high tides to the seaside town. “We got hit with three storms – two in January, one now – at the highest astronomical tides possible,” said Rick Rigoli, who oversaw the project. The sea level off the Massachusetts coast has risen by 8 inches since 1950, and is now rising by about 1 inch every 8 years.



THE KICKER

On average, installing a heat pump in your home could cut between 2.5 to 4.4 tons of carbon during the equipment’s lifespan, meaning widespread adoption could result in a 5% to 9% drop in national economy-wide emissions.

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Adaptation

The ‘Buffer’ That Can Protect a Town from Wildfires

Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.

Homes as a wildfire buffer.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.

More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.

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Spotlight

How the Tax Bill Is Empowering Anti-Renewables Activists

A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.

Massachusetts and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Library of Congress, Getty Images

A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”

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Hotspots

The Midwest Is Becoming Even Tougher for Solar Projects

And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.

  • Late last week, this county was teed up to potentially advance a new restrictive solar ordinance that would’ve cut off zoning access for large-scale facilities. That’s obviously bad for developers. But it would’ve still allowed solar facilities up to 50 acres and grandfathered in projects that had previously signed agreements with local officials.
  • However, solar opponents swamped the county Area Planning Commission meeting to decide on the ordinance, turning it into an over four-hour display in which many requested in public comments to outright ban solar projects entirely without a grandfathering clause.
  • It’s clear part of the opposition is inflamed over the EDF Paddlefish Solar project, which we ranked last year as one of the nation’s top imperiled renewables facilities in progress. The project has already resulted in a moratorium in another county, Huntington.
  • Although the Paddlefish project is not unique in its risks, it is what we view as a bellwether for the future of solar development in farming communities, as the Fort Wayne-adjacent county is a picturesque display of many areas across the United States. Pro-renewables advocates have sought to tamp down opposition with tactics such as a direct text messaging campaign, which I previously scooped last week.
  • Yet despite the counter-communications, momentum is heading in the other direction. At the meeting, officials ultimately decided to punt a decision to next month so they could edit their draft ordinance to assuage aggrieved residents.
  • Also worth noting: anyone could see from Heatmap Pro data that this county would be an incredibly difficult fight for a solar developer. Despite a slim majority of local support for renewable energy, the county has a nearly 100% opposition risk rating, due in no small part to its large agricultural workforce and MAGA leanings.

2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.

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