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A handful of bills have been introduced that seek to adapt to more frequent heat waves.
What are we going to do about the heat? As devastatingly hot as this summer has been — and it has broken records and likely killed thousands of Americans — next summer will almost certainly be worse. Will Congress act?
New federal legislation to attack the root of the problem by reducing carbon emissions isn’t on the table, thanks to Republican control of the House. But that doesn’t mean there’s zero chance of any kind of heat legislation emerging this year. Republicans have proven open to funding ideas like better hurricane forecasting, the streamlining of flood insurance claims, and more seawalls — all things that get lumped into the category of adaptation to extreme weather or resilience. Could something similar be possible for heat?
A handful of bills have been introduced — almost all by Democrats — that seek to adapt to heat in one way or another. Because adapting to hotter temperatures isn’t as simple as erecting new levies, all the legislation seeks in one way or another to ensure everyone has access to a cooler environment. That might mean giving people money to keep their air conditioners running, funding cooling centers, or building shade outside.
Here are the bills, from most reactive to most proactive:
1. The Extreme Heat Emergency Act:This bill would put heat waves on FEMA’s list of major disaster qualifying events — making funds available for cooling centers and additional personnel. Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona, introduced the bill alongside Representatives Mark Amodei, a Republican from Nevada, and Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat from Texas..
It might have a better chance with Republicans than its counterparts because FEMA is familiar, says Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina and the executive director of RepublicEn, a project of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University that seeks to use “conservative principles” to solve climate change. The agency “butters the bread in conservative districts” in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida when disaster strikes, Inglis explained.
The problem is that FEMA funding only arrives after a disaster has already taken place. Alex Flint, executive director of the right-leaning climate think tank Alliance for Market Solutions, referred to FEMA funding and emergency supplemental bills as “old tools.”
“We will see the need to address higher temperatures in the defense bill, transportation bill, farm bill,” he said. “But policymakers are only just starting to grapple with the near-term effects of this long-term crisis.”
“Things can get more expensive after the fact,” Amy Bailey, director of climate resilience and sustainability at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told me.
2. The Heating and Cooling Relief Act: This bill, introduced by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and New York Representative Jamaal Bowman, both Democrats, would inject tens of billions of dollars into the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income families pay their utility bills. The bill would also increase funding for cooling assistance — but it also hasn’t attracted a single Republican cosponsor, consistent with the party’s wariness about extending government assistance to low-income Americans.
3. The SHADE Act: This bill would do what its name implies and fund the creation of shade to attack urban heat islands, especially in areas that are low-income or have historically experienced discrimination. The bill has attracted 55 cosponsors — all Democrats.
4. The Preventing HEAT Illness and Death Act:Of the options, this bill is the most wide-reaching. It calls for a study that would identify the gaps in what we know about extreme heat as well as the public facilities (read: schools and prisons) without air conditioning. It would also offer $100 million in financial assistance to communities that want to adapt to extreme heat — installing cool roofs, creating more urban forestry, or making a grid more resilient, as well as training on risk communications — with the condition that 40% of its funding goes towards communities that are low-income or have environmental justice concerns. And it also calls for similar interagency communication on extreme heat that already exists for hurricanes and floods.
“It’s a perfectly reasonable bill that’s aimed towards saving lives on the ground,” said Alice Nam, press secretary for Representative. Marilyn Strickland, a Democrat from Washington state and one of the bill’s House sponsors. “It doesn’t propose a one-size fits all solution.”
“We need the federal government to respond with the urgency these climate and public health crises demand,” sponsor Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote in a statement to Heatmap.
And interagency communication, Bailey added, would be an “incredible benefit” — helping communities access resources faster. Extreme climate events that cost more than $1 billion, she noted, happened on average every 18 days in 2022, so speed is key.
Markey introduced the same bill in 2021, which advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee in a bipartisan vote. This year’s version doesn’t have a single Republican co-sponsor in the House — though its authors are actively looking for them, Nam said.
“It’s really hard to tell what is too big of a pill for Republicans to swallow,” she said.
Last Congress, the bill was introduced into the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Science, Space and Technology Committee — meaning that this time, either Representative Frank Lucas, Republican of Oklahoma, or Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington state, would need to hear the bill, and Republicans on either of those committees would need to vote in its favor.
Inglis noted that Republicans would likely take issue with the fact that the bill relies on a comparatively narrow set of funds and grants, in addition to the possibility that it could add regulations to plans to adapt to heat. “Conservatives are right to say we don’t need a U.S. Department of Trees for cities,” Inglis said, noting that Republican members would likely prefer for cities to lead the charge themselves — though he added that that still often requires federal block grants.
But eventually, Flint said, Republicans — even in the House — will come around to the idea that the government should spend money to fund adaptation to climate change.
“Voters of all political persuasions are going to be impacted by fires, flooding, hurricanes, and politicians will have to respond,” he noted. “The climate doesn’t care about people’s politics and will change the lives of Republicans and Democrats alike.”
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Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.