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Current conditions: Record rainfall swamped Vienna, Austria, over the weekend • Russia evacuated school children from summer camps in parts of Siberia as wildfires rage • It will be a pleasant 72 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Chicago today for the start of the Democratic National Convention.
The Democratic National Convention kicks off today in Chicago, where Vice President Kamala Harris will be officially recognized as the party’s 2024 presidential nominee. President Biden and first lady Jill Biden are expected to speak today, former President Barack Obama is scheduled to appear tomorrow, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will take center stage Wednesday to accept the vice-presidential nomination, and Harris will speak on Thursday. The rest of the schedule hasn’t been officially announced, but climate change will be an unavoidable topic. E&E News reported that climate will be a prominent theme on at least one of the event’s four nights, with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and EPA Administrator Michael Regan likely to tout the Biden administration’s environmental wins. Climate advocates will be out in force, making the case “for candidates up and down the ballot in November to speak often about the success of the Inflation Reduction Act,” E&E News added. Convention attendees reportedly will receive regular pop-up ads on their devices from the event’s “clean energy sponsor,” Chicago-based Invenergy, about the economic benefits of the solar boom. The event runs through Thursday.
Heavy rain inundated parts of the East Coast yesterday, triggering catastrophic flash floods and disrupting travel. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency for parts of Connecticut, including Fairfield, New Haven, Litchfield and Hartford counties, after about 10 inches of rain fell across the region. Meteorologists called this a one-in-1,000-year event. “This amount of precipitation wasn’t expected by anyone today,” Kyle Pederson, a NWS meteorologist, toldThe New York Times. Streets and cars were submerged and multiple water rescues had to be carried out.
Flash flood warnings were issued for Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. In NYC, water poured from the ceiling into Chelsea Market. Amtrak trains were disrupted between New York and Philadelphia, and flights were delayed out of Boston Logan International Airport.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, more than 100 people who attended an air show were treated for heat-related illnesses on Saturday. Temperatures inched toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit at the Pikes Peak Regional Air Show in Colorado Springs, and there was little cloud cover or shade to provide relief. The fire department said most people were treated on-site but 10 were sent to hospitals. At the event’s second day, on Sunday, organizers put in place extra precautions like water stations and shade tents. “No one wants a repeat of Saturday,” said Colorado Springs Sports Corporation spokeswoman Lauren DeMarco. Parts of Colorado have been experiencing near-record high temperatures for August. In Denver, the extreme heat is also making air quality worse. Heat alerts were in place for more than 52 million people across the central Plains and South over the weekend. The heat index could reach 112 degrees today in parts of north Texas.
In case you missed it on Friday, a U.S. appeals court scrapped some of President Biden’s natural gas pipeline safety standards. The rules, put in place by the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said natural gas operators had to repair pipelines showing signs of wear and tear, like corrosion or cracks and dents. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the agency hadn’t adequately analyzed the costs of those repairs or explained why they would be justified, and tossed them out.
Researchers have created a “hailstone library” where they are collecting and studying hailstone samples to help inform weather models. The library, located at Australia’s University of Queensland, contains hundreds of samples of hailstones from all over the world to help scientists better understand how things like shape, weight, and size affect the way the stones behave in a storm.
“The end game is to be able to predict in real-time how big hail will be, and where it will fall,” said Dr. Joshua Soderholm, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow from the University of Queensland’s School of the Environment. “More accurate forecasts would of course warn the public so they can stay safe during hailstorms and mitigate damage. But it could also significantly benefit industries such as insurance, agriculture, and solar farming which are all sensitive to hail.” Heatmap’s Jeva Lange noted back in June that most climate models don’t look specifically at hail trends, but that “it’s been hypothesized that climate change could create larger and more destructive hail in the future.”
This is the first year since 2011 that tickets for the Burning Man Festival haven’t sold out. Last year’s event was spoiled by heavy rain that flooded the Nevada desert and left stranded attendees to fend for themselves in deep mud.
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Current conditions: Dangerous flash flooding could hit the south-central United States today, with some areas facing the potential for 8 inches of rain in 12 hours • The U.N. is warning countries in Northwest Africa that weather conditions are favorable to locust swarms• Temperatures in parts of Pakistan today will approach 122 degrees Fahrenheit, the global record for April.
After 100 days in office, President Trump has the lowest job approval rating of any president at this point in their tenure in the past 80 years. “Chaos, uncertainty, ‘we don’t know yet.’ These are words I’ve heard more during Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House than I’ve heard at any other time as a reporter,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo writes for Heatmap (something I can vouch for, too). From his slashing of the federal workforce to regulatory rollbacks to his unpopular tariffs and targeted attacks on “climate” in every form, Trump is reshaping the economic and policy environment from the top down.
Emily put together five charts yesterday to help visualize the impact of Trump’s second term to date. Some of the most striking takeaways include:
You can read Emily’s full story — with charts! — here.
Emily also reviewed the first draft of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s budget, which was released on Tuesday. “Remember, the name of the game for Republicans is to find ways to pay for Trump’s long list of tax cuts,” she writes. In the proposed budget, the Transportation Committee puts forward one new revenue-generating program — an annual fee of $200 on electric vehicles and $20 on conventional gas-powered cars to pay into the Highway Trust Fund — plus a list of “rescissions” of unobligated funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. That list includes efforts to claw back more than $1.7 billion for improving the efficiency of government buildings, as well as whatever remains of the $3.2 billion allocated to the Federal Highway Administration to promote improved walkability and transportation access, along with five other key IRA grant programs. But “this is just a first pass,” Emily reminds us, “and this is all subject to change.”
COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago warned that as the U.S. retreats from the fight against global warming, it will become increasingly difficult to persuade other countries to commit to the energy transition. Speaking at the BloombergNEF Summit in New York, approximately six months out from COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Corrêa do Lago stressed that “There is obviously some that say ‘God, how am I going to convince my people to lower emissions when the richest country isn’t doing the same.’”
It is unclear what sort of delegation the U.S. will send to COP30, given the Trump administration’s severing of global climate research and its exit from the Paris Climate Agreement. China, meanwhile, has announced its intention to commit to stricter climate goals ahead of the November meetings in Brazil. “China is demonstrating an absolute conviction that it's the right way to go,’’ Corrêa do Lago said.
Ford’s director of electrified propulsion engineering announced on LinkedIn that the company has made a significant breakthrough in battery technology, the Detroit Free Press reports. “This isn’t just a lab experiment,” the director, Charles Poon, wrote. “We’re actively working to scale [Lithium Manganese Rich] cell chemistry and integrate them into our future vehicle lineup within this decade.” LMR replaces commonly used nickel and cobalt with manganese, which Poon says costs less and helps approach “true cost parity with gasoline vehicles” as well as “higher energy density” that “translates to greater range, allowing our customers to go further on a single charge.”
Many companies have made advances in LMR, which is not a new technology, but Ford clarified in comments to the Free Press that it has overcome some of the technical challenges of LMR, like voltage decay, while “not sacrificing energy density.” Still, Ford was short on details, leaving some skeptical of the supposed revolution in battery technology. Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, thinks Ford “found a workaround, but this is far from a breakthrough,” according to Autoevolution. “However, such efforts are welcome as carmakers try to push the envelope of current battery technology.”
The largest bank in Canada, the Royal Bank of Canada, announced on Tuesday that it is “retiring” its sustainable finance goals and will not disclose its findings on how its high-carbon energy financing compares with its low-carbon energy financing, according to the Canadian Press. Per RBC, the move is due to regulatory changes, including Canada’s Competition Act, which was designed to prevent corporate greenwashing by requiring climate reporting to be backed by internationally recognized measures,The Globe and Mailexplains.
By backing off its target, RBC is abandoning a $500 billion commitment to sustainable finance this year. The bank previously exited the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a global initiative spearheaded by Mark Carney, who was elected to a term as prime minister earlier this week. While “campaigners worry banks are seizing on a shift in the political climate, particularly under U.S. President Donald Trump, to dilute commitments to act quickly on decarbonising their portfolios” — per Reuters — RBC said it has not abandoned its intentions of addressing climate change and that it should be considered the “bank of choice” for the energy transition.
A startup in Switzerland is installing removable solar panels in the unused space between train tracks. The company, Sun-Ways, says that if it installs panels across the entire 3,300 miles of the Swiss rail network, it could generate one billion kilowatt-hours of solar power per year, equivalent to approximately 2% of the nation’s electricity needs.
Rob and Jesse talk with Texas energy expert Doug Lewin.
Texas is one of the country’s biggest producers of zero-emissions energy. Last year, the Lone Star State surpassed California to become the country’s No. 1 market for utility-scale solar. More solar and batteries were added to the Texas grid in 2024 than any other energy source, and the state has long dominated in onshore wind.
But that buildout is now threatened. A new tranche of bills in the Texas House and Senate could impose punitive engineering requirements on wind, solar, and storage plants — even those already in operation — and they could send the state’s power bills soaring.
Doug Lewin is the founder and CEO of Stoic Energy Partners in Austin, Texas. He writes the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, and he is the host of the Energy Capital podcast. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob talk with Doug about how Texas became a clean energy powerhouse, how it has dealt with eye-watering demand power growth, and why a handful of bills in the Texas statehouse could break its electricity market. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is the menagerie of legislation here that folks need to understand? What should they be following?
Doug Lewin: There’s a couple of different flavors of this. There’s a bunch of them that are just right up, they’re on a level like 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D — they’re all major, major problems that if any of them passed, the cost for all consumers in Texas would go up. And this is something that I think is starting to set in at the legislature right now — that members are starting to think about, what does this vote look like? If I actually take this vote and power prices go up 20%, 50%, 80%, what have I just done? That’s starting to set in.
But I would say one of them that is the most pernicious — and I think you’re going to see this around the country as a lot of the national groups start talking about it more and more — is firming requirements on renewables and assigning them to individual projects, or even individual developers across their portfolios. Because as you guys know, and I think most of your listeners know, but legislators don’t necessarily know yet — they’re getting an education in real time right now — you don’t firm for individual resources. You firm for a system, right? That is far more economically efficient. '
And we should talk about the right level of how many backups we need. Those conversations have been going on for years, and they continue to go on in Ercot stakeholder forums and at the Public Utility Commission. But to require every resource to have its own backup, you create, as I heard one witness at one of the hearings say, you’ve got a thousand mini Ercots, right? Everybody’s gotta have their own backup. That is an insane way to run an energy system.
Meyer: Can you just describe what exactly you mean by — like, what would it mean to firm up solar? What do these bills actually require?
Lewin: One of them actually requires solar to have full, 24-hour, round the clock backup. So like, forget the fact that solar has meant so much for Texas in the summertime. We had no conservation alerts last year, 2024, the sixth hottest summer in the history of the state. Not only did we not have any blackouts or energy emergencies, not even a conservation alert, all summer long. Because that 30 gigawatts, when it’s hottest, when it’s 105 degrees [Fahrenheit] and all those air conditioners are cranking all around Texas — we love our air conditioning — solar is just perfectly suited for that. But no, you would have to back it up around the clock.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released a budget proposal that attempts to claw back nearly $9 billion in grants.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the first draft of its portion of Trump’s big budget bill on Tuesday, and it includes the first official swipe at the Inflation Reduction Act of the months-long process ahead.
Remember, the name of the game for Republicans is to find ways to pay for Trump’s long list of tax cuts. The budget framework Congress passed two weeks ago assigned eleven House committees to craft proposals that would each raise or reduce revenue by a specific amount to accomplish Trump’s agenda.
The Transportation Committee proposal contains one new revenue-generating program, placing a $200 annual fee on electric vehicles and $100 fee on hybrid vehicles, alongside a $20 fee on conventional cars. The money would go into the Highway Trust Fund, which is currently financed mostly by the gas tax — and which, of course, EV owners don’t pay.
But the draft also includes a list of “rescissions” of unobligated funds from seven IRA grant programs. While the Biden administration awarded the vast majority of the money allocated to the programs listed, in many cases the recipients never reached a final project agreement with the government. That means a lot of the funding can, in fact, be clawed back.
Take the first item on the list, the Alternative Fuel and Low Emissions Aviation Technology Program. The IRA allocated $291 million for grants to support producing sustainable aviation fuel and developing low-emission aviation technologies, and the Biden administration awarded the full amount to 36 recipients in August of last year. It’s not clear how many reached final project agreements with the Federal Aviation Administration, however. A quick scan of the government’s database of awards is missing a $25.7 million grant to oil giant BP to produce sustainable aviation fuel at its refinery in Washington State, but it does include the full obligation of $240,000 to the City of Atlanta to conduct a study on deploying SAF at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.
Grants aren’t always logged in USASpending.gov in a timely manner, so it’s possible BP does have an agreement in place. Among the other awardees that I could not find listed in the database were World Energy, which was awarded nearly $22 million to install infrastructure enabling Los Angeles International Airport to get deliveries of SAF, and Buckeye Terminals, which got $24 million to upgrade four SAF storage facilities in the midwest. Republicans tend to support biofuels, so it’s somewhat surprising they went after this program — especially since $291 million is chump change on the scale of a multi-trillion-dollar budget.
We know a bit more about the second item on the list, the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program. This one allocated just over $3.2 billion to the Federal Highway Administration to award state and local governments with grants to improve walkability and transportation access, to mitigate transportation-related pollution in disadvantaged communities, and to improve transportation equity. The advocacy group Transportation for America found that of the nearly 100 awards the Biden administration announced from this program in 2023, totaling more than $3.1 billion, only 25 projects may have reached a final project agreement, per USASpending.gov. The group says this means it’s possible that nearly the entire $3 billion is up for grabs.
Other funding targeted includes more than $3.3 billion across three allocations to the General Services Administration to improve the efficiency of government buildings, prioritize lower-carbon building materials, and invest in other “emerging and sustainable” building solutions. The Government Accountability Office published a well-timed report about these three programs today, noting that while 99% of the money has been awarded, only half has been obligated, leaving more than $1.7 billion for Congress to take back.
Lastly, the proposal lists $2 billion in grants for states and local governments to use low-carbon materials in road projects. The Department of Transportation awarded $1.8 billion of the money to 39 states last year, although again, it's unclear how many of these awards have been obligated.
Having said all that, let’s assume for a moment that the full amount allocated to each of the programs was available to Congress to claw back. That would come to just under $9 billion of the $10 billion of deficit reductions the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is required to find under the special rules governing the budget bill.
But the draft bill also contains huge amounts of new spending, including allocating more than $20 billion to the United States Coast Guard for border security and $15 billion for upgrades to Air Traffic Control systems. The nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that the new fees on EVs and other vehicles could raise between $7 and $33 billion over the lifetime of the bill, which is not enough to pay for all of that. (They also note that it would barely make up for the more than $200 billion deficit in the Highway Trust Fund.) So if Republicans want to keep those provisions, they may have to find more cuts. They’ll likely have to find more anyway, depending on how much of the IRA money has been obligated.
I’ll leave you with a reminder that I’ll be repeating ad nauseam over the next few weeks or months as Congress hammers out its budget bill: This is just a first pass, and this is all subject to change. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will be holding a markup of the proposal on Wednesday, where it will debate each line and make changes before voting on whether to advance it.
Most of the Inflation Reduction Act programs come under the aegis of the Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees, neither of which have published any bill text yet. But we’ll be here for you when they do.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove a reference to Gevo, a sustainable aviation fuel producer, which told Heatmap that it declined its awarded grant due to changed business priorities. It has also been update to include the Union of Concerned Scientists’ revenue estimate.