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Three important things, plus one very unimportant thing
Hello from Dubai, where the United Nations’ annual climate conference — that is, COP28 — officially began today.
This was an enormous day for climate and environmental news around the world. Not only did COP28 begin with a surprising (and important) accomplishment, but the Environmental Protection Agency proposed cracking down on lead pipes, one of the biggest remaining sources of water pollution in the United States. Tesla is also set to release — and announce a price for — its gargantuan Cybertruck today, one of the most contentious electric vehicles launches in history.
So let’s get down to it.
1. COP28 officially began. This afternoon, the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — or COP28 — officially began. It will run here at Expo City at the southern end of Dubai until December 12.
It was not, technically, the only climate conference that started in Dubai today: Technically, three conferences kicked off. That is because since the world adopted the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 — which is the big, arching UN treaty to do something about climate change— countries have stacked other agreements on top of it. So today was also the beginning of CMP18 (the 18th Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol) and CMA5 (the fifth Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement).
2. The conference launched the loss and damage fund. This was a welcome surprise. For years, countries have debated over “loss and damage” — essentially, what richer countries that are responsible for most global warming so far owe to poorer countries that are dealing with its consequences. Last year at the COP in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, countries agreed to establish a loss and damage fund for the first time. They’ve been hammering out the details over the past year — at the insistence of the U.S. and Europe, the fund will be hosted first by the World Bank — and today the fund was officially launched, or in UN parlance, operationalized.
Germany, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates all gave money to the fund. The U.S. donated the second smallest amount, after Japan.
3. The World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2023 will be the hottest year in human history. Since temperatures in July, August, and September destroyed all-time records, this sad milestone has been more or less expected. But today the World Meteorological Organization, a UN-associated weather body, confirmed that 2023 will be the hottest year ever measured.
Tomorrow, a subsection of COP — the World Climate Action Summit (!) — will begin. This is the part of COP where various world leaders come and speak to the negotiators.
This year sports a perhaps underwhelming set of world leaders. Neither President Joe Biden nor President Xi Jinping will be attending. The highest profile elected leaders will probably be President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom. King Charles III is also coming.
Following this event, but also overlapping with it, will be a period with lots of big announcements. Investors will announce new projects and investments. Companies will announce new voluntary climate-action coalitions. Countries and cities will announce new coalitions of voluntary action. It will be fairly hard to tell which of these actually matter in the moment, but some of them probably will.
Then there will probably be a news lull for a few days. Finally, at the end of the conference, negotiators will hash out the details of this year’s joint statement.
Even though COP officially starts today, it was largely uneventful here in Dubai. No world leaders spoke; the only big news was the loss and damage fund. Many news articles heralded that COP has begun in Dubai!, without saying what, exactly, that means or how people are spending their time.
Let me decipher it for you. While COP is an international media spectacle, it’s also an enormous in-person conference — and it is subject to some irreducible geometric challenges. This year, those challenges exist on a new scale: With more than 80,000 people attending the Dubai proceedings, this is by far the largest COP ever. (For comparison, about 50,000 people attended the Paris COP in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was adopted.)
Here is what I mean: Today, everyone had to pick up their conference badges and lanyards. That is what happened at COP today. A small suburb’s worth of people — including me—waited in a line to go through security and show a chipper UN employee our registration papers and get our photo taken. The line was about 1.2 kilometers long (literally— I corroborated that with my Apple Health data) but it was run efficiently and cheerfully.
According to a forensic reconstruction of my activities, compiled chiefly from an Uber receipt and the timestamp on some iPhone photos, I arrived at the conference center at 12:25pm and had a name badge almost exactly two hours later. I began keeping a journal when I realized that I was unlikely to get to the front of the line any time soon.
12:25 p.m. I arrive at Expo 2020, the nearest dropoff to the conference center. A man with a UN badge tells me to join a line without providing any details. I decide to follow the late Soviet rule that if you see a long line, you should just get in it.
12:35 p.m. A quasi-status system immediately makes itself clear. Some people have green lanyards, which entitle them to enter the Green Zone, the “trade show” part of the COP, which is governed by the U.A.E. Others have blue lanyards, which let them the Blue Zone, the official UN part of the conference.
1:14 p.m. We are handed aluminum Aquafina cans, a thoughtful gesture. Many of the people near me in line seem to be in their 50s and 60s, and the subtropical sun is hot and unrelenting. They must be starting to lose it out here.
1:18 p.m. Studying the can, I notice it is labeled “Still Drinking Water.” I find the “still” to be ontologically reassuring. It is good to know that this is still drinking water. Thank goodness I am not losing it like all these middle-aged people around me.
1:35 p.m. A 30-something man in line is wearing a t-shirt with the words “Dinosaur Facts” on it. Highlight of my COP so far.
1:46 p.m. I dimly realize that Sydney, Australia, (where it is 8:46pm) is closer to Dubai time than New York is.
1:51p.m. It strikes me that COP and Disney World are plagued by the same problem: very long lines. But if this were Disney World, we would have encountered several entertaining animatronics by now.
2:19 p.m. I finally reach through security and waiting in the final room: to receive my pass. As soon as I get through, I realize I have been silently standing in line next to a very famous environmental justice academic for an hour. With that opportunity already squandered, my COP begins.
Read Robinson Meyer’s last dispatch from COP28:
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The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.
A new provision in the Senate reconciliation bill would neuter the country’s fuel efficiency standards for automakers, gutting one of the federal government’s longest-running programs to manage gasoline prices and air pollution.
The new provision — which was released on Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee — would essentially strip the government of its ability to enforce the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE standards.
The CAFE rules are the government’s main program to improve the fuel economy of new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the United States. Over the past 20 years, the rules have helped push the fuel efficiency of new vehicles to record highs even as consumers have adopted crossovers and SUVs en masse.
But the Republican reconciliation bill would essentially end the program as a practical concern for automakers. It would set all fines issued under the program to zero, stripping the government of its ability to punish automakers that sell too many polluting vehicles.
“It would essentially eviscerate the standard without actually doing so directly,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me.
“It says that, ‘We have standards here, but we don’t care if you comply or not. If you don’t comply, we’re not going to hold you responsible,’” she said.
Representatives for the Senate Commerce Committee did not respond to an immediate request for comment. A talking points memo released by the committee on Thursday said that the new bill would “[bring] down automobile prices modestly by eliminating CAFE penalties on automakers that design cars to conform to the wishes of D.C. bureaucrats rather than consumers.”
Since 1975, Congress has required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (pronounced NIT-suh) to set annual fuel efficiency standards for new cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules generally require new vehicles sold nationwide to get a little more fuel efficient, on average, every year.
The rules have remained in effect — with varying levels of stringency — for 50 years, although they have generally encouraged automakers to get more efficient since Congress strengthened the law on a bipartisan basis in 2007.
In model-year 2023, the most recent period for which data is available, new cars and light trucks achieved a real-world fuel economy of 27.1 miles per gallon, an all-time high. The vehicle fleet was set to hit another record high in 2024, according to last year’s report.
Opponents of the fuel economy rules argue that the regulations increase the sticker price of new cars and trucks and push automakers to build less profitable vehicles. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025, has called the rules a “backdoor EV mandate.”
The rules’ supporters say that the standards are necessary because consumers don’t take fuel costs — or the environmental or public health costs of air pollution — into account when buying a vehicle. They say the rules keep gasoline prices low for all Americans by encouraging fuel efficiency across the board.
The strict Biden-era rules were projected to save consumers $23 billion in gasoline costs, according to an agency analysis. The American Lung Association said that the rules would prevent more than 2 million pediatric asthma attacks and save hundreds of infant lives by 2050.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has targeted the fuel economy rules as part of a wide-ranging effort to roll back Biden-era energy policy. On January 28, as his first official act, Duffy ordered NHTSA to retroactively weaken the rules for all cars and light trucks sold after model-year 2022.
On Friday, Duffy separately issued a legal opinion that would restrict NHTSA’s ability to include electric vehicles in its real-world estimates of the country’s fuel economy rules. The opinion sets up the next round of CAFE rules to be considerably weaker than existing law.
But the new Republican reconciliation bill, if adopted, would render those rules moot.
Under current law, automakers must pay a fine when the average fuel economy of the vehicles they sell exceeds the fuel economy standard set for that year. Automakers can avoid paying that penalty by buying “credits” from other car companies that have done better than the rules require.
The fine’s size is set by a formula written into the law. That calculation includes the number of cars sold above the fuel-economy threshold, how much those cars exceeded it, and a $5 multiplier. The GOP tax bill rewrites the law to set the multiplier to zero dollars.
In essence, no matter how much an automaker exceeds the fuel economy rules, the GOP reconciliation bill will now multiply their fine by zero.
The original CAFE law contains a second formula allowing the government to set even higher penalties if doing so would achieve “substantial energy conservation.” The new reconciliation bill sets the multiplier in this formula, too, to zero dollars.
The CAFE law’s penalties can be significant. The automaker Stellantis, which owns Fiat and Chrysler, recently paid more than $426 million in penalties for cars sold from model year 2018 to 2020. Last year, General Motors paid a $38 million fine for light trucks sold in model year 2020.
The CAFE provision in the GOP mega-bill seems designed to skirt past the Byrd rule, a Senate rule that policies in reconciliation bills must affect revenue, spending, or generally have more than a “merely incidental” effect on the federal budget.
But Carlson, the former NHTSA acting administrator, doubted whether the provision should really survive a Byrd bath.
Zeroing out the fines is “not really about revenue,” she said, but about compliance with the law. “This is a way to try to couch repeal of CAFE in revenue terms instead of doing it outright.”
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.