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Climate change was a major topic.
If we learned anything new from the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, it was not what anyone planned to do about climate change. The candidates failed to expand on their already scant or nonexistent platforms. Almost all of them failed to acknowledge that climate change was caused by humans.
But what was notable was the fact that the issue has finally earned a more prominent spot on the debate stage. Four years ago, activists railed against Democratic primary debate moderators for not asking any questions about climate change until the second hour of the program. The Fox News hosts got to the issue in about 20 minutes.
Below we’ve recapped what happened next, and the other most remarkable moments of the night for global warming, decarbonization, and energy.
Getty Images/Heatmap Illustration
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, making his first comments in the debate, used a prompt to discuss the economy as a chance to rail against President Biden's historic climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.
“The economy, energy, and national security are all tied together. We’ve got a plan, the $1.2 trillion of Green New Deal spending in the ‘Inflation Creation Act,’ that’s subsidizing China,” Burgum said. His primarily claim: That IRA subsidies will benefit Chinese battery and renewable manufacturers.
“If we’re going to stop buying oil from the Middle East and start buying batteries from China, we’re going to trade OPEC for Sinopec.”
The IRA, outside of the U.S., has come under fire for its stringent domestic production requirements for electric vehicles and includes domestic content bonuses. —Will Kubzansky
Screenshot courtesy of Fox News
It only took 20 minutes for the Republican debate’s big climate change question to be asked.
Moderator Bret Baier chronicled the summer’s disasters, mentioning missing people in Maui, the rarity of a tropical storm in California, and the overheated ocean in Florida. Then Fox News played a clip from a young conservative.
Alexander Diaz, a student at the Catholic University of America on behalf of the conservative group Young America’s Foundation, noted the importance of climate change to young voters, teeing up Fox News’ Martha MacCallum to ask a simple question: “We want to start on this with a show of hands. Do you believe … human behavior is causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.”
No candidates had raised their hand — although former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson seemed to be inching his hand up — when Ron DeSantis interrupted to say: “We’re not schoolchildren, let’s have the debate.” —Will Kubzansky and Emily Pontecorvo
Getty Images/Heatmap Illustration
Vivek Ramaswamy initially introduced himself to the American people on Wednesday night as a “skinny guy with a funny last name” — but perhaps his name was more aptly made, at least with many young conservatives, by calling “the climate change agenda … a hoax.”
Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur running for his first political office, has previously claimed he’s not a “climate denier,” but also played coy, saying global warming will not be “entirely bad.” It was also not the first time he’s attacked what he calls “the climate cult in America.” In a video shared by his Twitter account this spring, Ramaswamy slammed climate activists for allegedly saying “that you have to abandon carbon emissions at all costs if you live in the United States.” He added, “It’s a cult that says … ‘We’re against nuclear energy’ … because nuclear energy might be too good at solving the alleged clean energy problem, which means they couldn’t use the climate as an excuse to advance a very different agenda.” Nuclear energy has historically been something of a bogeyman for environmentalists, who fear waste and meltdowns, but the nuclear power industry is also receiving billions of dollars from Biden’s two biggest pieces of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Wednesday’s “hoax” comment specifically came in reaction to the Fox News moderators trying to push the candidates into a yes-or-no answer about whether humans are responsible for climate change. Notably, no one immediately raised their hand. An overwhelming consensus of scientists — 99.9% of them, The Guardian found — say climate change is caused by mankind.
Ramaswamy’s answer was clearly an attempt to align his candidacy with former President Trump, who has called climate change "a hoax," “a total hoax,” “an expensive hoax,” and “a total, and very expensive, hoax.” Somewhat surprisingly, Ramaswamy's quip was met by audience boos — as well as interruptions from other candidates, who took issue with him calling himself the “only person on the stage who wasn’t bought and paid for.”
Earlier in the debate, a number of candidates had tip-toed around the possibility of “open[ing] up … energy production,” though Ramaswamy — who’s been said to be gunning to be “Republicans’ next Trump” — was characteristically blunt on that point, as well. “This isn’t that complicated, guys,” the 38-year-old chided his peers. “Unlock American energy. Drill. Frack. Burn coal. Embrace nuclear.” —Jeva Lange
Getty Images/Heatmap Illustration
When moderator Martha MacCallum asked the candidates to raise their hand if they believe that human behavior is causing climate change, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took issue with the question.
“We’re not schoolchildren,” DeSantis immediately snapped back before anyone had put a hand in the air. “Let’s have the debate.” But instead of having the debate, he pivoted to bashing President Biden and showing off his extreme weather bonafides. “Biden was on the beach while those people were suffering,” he said, referencing the president’s response to the wildfires in Maui. “As someone who’s handled disasters in Florida, you gotta be activated.”
From there, the moment descended into chaos. Vivek Ramaswamy interrupted to say the “climate change agenda” was a “hoax.” Christie jumped in to toss insults at Ramaswamy.
The only candidate who managed to get a word in about their stance on the issue was Nikki Haley. ”We care about clean air and clean water but there’s a right way to do it,“ she said. “First of all, is climate change real? Yes it is.”
Haley's sole proposal was to push China and India to cut their emissions. She accused Biden of putting money in China’s pocket by subsidizing electric vehicles, and said the subsidies are “not working.” However, car makers have responded to the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies by investing millions in domestic manufacturing and domestic supply chains.
At the end, President Biden chimed in on Twitter with the last word. —Emily Pontecorvo
This article was first published at 9:48 PM ET on Wednesday, August 23. It was last updated at 11:44 PM ET.
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Even if the technology works, the economics might not.
Nuclear fusion, sometimes breathlessly referred to as the “holy grail” of clean energy, capable of providing “near limitless” energy, might actually, finally be on the verge of working. And when that first prototype reactor turns on, the feverish headlines about harnessing the power of the sun and the stars here on Earth will at least be somewhat justified. Fusion is going to be a massive scientific achievement, but in a practical sense, it might not matter.
“We can make it work,” Egemen Kolemen, fusion expert and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, told me. “But at what price?”
Figuring out fusion is one thing, penciling out the economics another. There’s a nontrivial chance that fusion could become a scientific reality but remain too expensive to make a dent in the barriers to decarbonization.
How this plays out largely depends on what the grid looks like by the mid-2030s, when the leading fusion startups think we’ll see the first demonstration reactors come online. President Biden wants to fully decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035. And as ambitious — or, as many say, unrealistic — as that may be, how close we get and how we get there will determine what opportunities remain for fusion.
By the mid-2030s, the cost of building new fission reactors could come down significantly; if The Nuclear Company has its way, we’ll have built a 6 gigawatt fleet of standard nuclear plants by then. Or maybe small, modular reactors will finally prove out, squeezing much of the market space for fusion. And then there’s all the other emergent, grid-firming tech in various stages of development. Think long-duration battery storage, enhanced geothermal, and hydrogen for starters.
“Batteries go down in price, hydrogen goes down, you know, two orders of magnitude, whatever. And then you say, we’re okay, we don’t need an extra [energy] source,” Kolemen told me. “So we have to be very clear that that’s an option as well.”
Needless to say, investors know it’s a gamble. “This is venture, of course there’s a chance that it might not be economically feasible,” Gabriel Kra, managing director and co-founder at climate tech VC Prelude Ventures, told me. “That’s not a reason, in any case, not to try.” Prelude Ventures has invested in two fusion companies, Thea Energy and Xcimer Energy, while venture capitalists on the whole have poured $6.7 billion into fusion since 1992, according to the Fusion Industry Association, the vast majority of that in the past three years.
Many of these same venture firms are also placing big bets on other energy solutions that promise to provide many of the same benefits as fusion, such as Fervo’s enhanced geothermal tech, or Koloma’s artificial intelligence-powered geologic hydrogen detection system, or Form Energy’s long-duration iron-air batteries. But because none of these brand new technologies has yet achieved meaningful scale, creating simple price forecasts or cost curve models isn’t possible.
A refrain I heard a few times, however, is that no matter the energy mix of the future, fusion’s viability isn’t simply a matter of dollars and cents. “Even if fusion doesn’t get as cheap as solar or wind, or even if it doesn’t get as cheap as natural gas, there’s still a huge place for it in the grid,” Kra said.
Siting fusion reactors near dense urban areas, for example, could help solve one of the principal issues with renewables. “Even now, it’s becoming difficult to find sites for solar and wind, and we have a fraction of what we would need,” Jacob Schwartz, a staff research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, told me. “If you really want a lot of firm power that can be much physically denser than these other resources, you might really want to build fusion.” Siting fusion next to demand centers would also reduce the need to permit and build long transmission lines, which can take a decade or more if it happens at all.
Of course, fission reactors have these advantages too. A paper Schwartz and Kolemen published last year, modeling fusion’s place in various net-zero grid scenarios from 2036 to 2050, found that in most of them, fusion plants would be primarily displacing fission. That is, if they made sense at all. The authors (including Princeton energy systems professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins) also found that if the price of competing technologies creates at least a moderate market opportunity for fusion, we could wind up with 100 gigawatts or more of fusion capacity, about the size of the current domestic fission fleet. But if other technologies outperform and drop significantly in price, it’s possible that no commercial fusion plants would get built in that timeframe.
Kra, however, disagrees with a core assumption of the paper — that the U.S. will actually meet our carbon-free energy targets. “I don’t want to be a doomer, but I don’t think we’re going to decarbonize the grid by 2035,” Kra told me. “I think the first fusion plant that comes online, maybe between 2035 and 2040, will be displacing a fossil source at that moment in time.”
Looked at that way, the calculus changes. Fusion could become just another player in the renewables mix, slotting in alongside a plethora of other emergent and established carbon-free technologies to supplant fossil fuels in an all-of-the-above march towards zero emissions. It would still need to be cost-effective, of course, but if it’s framed as a possible successor to fossil fuels as opposed to a rival of existing clean energy sources, that’s a much better sales pitch.
That said, it’s going to take more than just reaching cost-parity with fission for fusion to take off. If that’s all we do, Kolemen told me, “it will have the exact same result, which is that nothing is going to be built.”
And even if fusion doesn’t end up penciling out for the U.S. grid, it may still in other areas of the world with less abundant renewable energy resources and rapid load growth. Phil Larochelle, the leader of Breakthrough Energy Ventures fusion investment strategy, told me that it’s really not the West that stands to benefit the most.
“You’ve got the rest of the world — call it, 80% of the world's population — who are trying to live a life of prosperity, like we do here.” But raising standards of living around the world means a huge increase in energy consumption. “And so then the question is, can you just kind of sneak across the finish line with wind, solar, storage, transmission, geothermal, a bit of natural gas?” Larochelle asked. While he said it should be possible, it wouldn’t allow for the flourishing vision of the future that he hopes to see. “Sustainable abundance for all. That’s, I think, where fusion really shines,” he told me.
Current conditions: Thunderstorms brought widespread flooding to Tampa Bay, Florida • The famous Constantine Arch in Rome was damaged by lightning • Super Typhoon Yagi is now the second-most powerful storm of 2024 and is expected to hit China on Friday.
The Biden administration today is expected to announce $7.3 billion in grants for rural electric cooperatives to finance clean energy projects aimed at bringing reliable, affordable energy to rural Americans. The infusion, which comes from the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program of the Inflation Reduction Act, is “the largest investment in rural electrification since FDR’s administration,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian. The 16 cooperatives will have projects dotted across 23 states. The projects are expected to create 4,500 permanent jobs and prevent more than 43 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution each year. Biden will announce the news at the Dairyland Power Cooperative in Wisconsin. Dairyland will receive $573 million for solar and wind installations across Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois. “One in five rural Americans will benefit from these clean energy investments, thanks to partnerships with rural electric cooperatives like Dairyland,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a statement. “Put simply, this is rural power, for rural America.”
Volvo is watering down its commitment to sell only electric vehicles by 2030, aiming instead to have at least 90% of its sales be electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles by that year. CEO Jim Rowan blamed market forces, lack of EV charging infrastructure, and lower-than-expected customer demand for the change. The company said it will invest in plug-in hybrids for growth. “We are resolute in our belief that our future is electric,” Rowan said. “However, it is clear that the transition to electrification will not be linear, and customers and markets are moving at different speeds.” The walk-back follows similar moves from other carmakers including Ford. Volvo was one of the first legacy automakers to commit to a fully-electric future, and as the Financial Timesnoted, it “remains the most bullish about the transition.”
The intense heat wave positioned over the West Coast is bringing dangerously hot temperatures to Southern California. In some areas, temperatures will be 20 degrees above normal for this time of year. Los Angeles will see triple-digit highs through the end of the week. Palm Springs will hit 114 degrees Fahrenheit today. The Woodland Hills neighborhood of L.A. could reach 118 degrees by Friday. “In terms of this summer, it’s going to be the hottest we’ve seen or close to it,” Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, told the Los Angeles Times. Cooling centers are open across the state and are listed here. According to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, average annual temperatures in the state have risen by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895. Seven of the past eight years have been the warmest on record.
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The Ultium electric vehicle battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, has joined the United Auto Workers union. The plant, which employs 1,000 people, is a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution. The UAW said in a statement that “the workers organized without facing threats or intimidation and won their union once a majority of workers signed cards.” This is the second Ultium plant to unionize, but the first in the South. The other, in Ohio, joined the UAW in 2022. “It could be a big deal,” wrote Jameson Dow at Electrek, “given the developing ‘battery belt’ in the U.S. South, where many companies have decided to build battery plants, with hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of thousands of jobs on the docket. If other factories see the success at GM, they might start getting their own ideas and unionization could spread through the industry.”
The results of a new YouGov survey show that drivers are terribly misinformed about the costs, safety, and functionality of electric vehicles. In the survey, 1,000 people who currently drive gas-powered cars were asked to read 10 statements about EVs and identify whether they were true or false. The majority (90%) of participants answered just five or fewer questions correctly, and more than half (57%) of participants scored no higher than two out of 10. In other words, if this test had been scored on an A-F grading scale, nearly everyone would have failed. Sixty-two percent of them said EVs are more expensive to run than internal combustion engine cars (they’re not), 41% thought EVs are more likely to catch fire (they’re not), and 35% believed EVs emit about the same CO2 over their lifetime as ICE vehicles (they don’t).
“This is affecting drivers’ car choices, with people displaying a poor understanding of EVs being less likely to want their next car to be an EV,” concluded the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, the nonprofit that commissioned the survey. “Drivers who scored two or less out of 10 were 11 times less likely to want their next car to be an EV than those who scored eight or more out of 10.”
The survey was conducted in the U.K., but many of these myths are common among U.S. drivers, too.
🙌 The Fight, a new Heatmap Plus weekly newsletter from senior reporter Jael Holzman, just launched. It will deliver must-read exclusive scoops and analysis on the local battles and national trends shaping the future of climate action. Check it out. 🙌
There’s a whole clean energy revolution happening — yes, even in Pennsylvania.
Fracking is just about the last thing Kamala Harris wants to talk about right now, which may be understandable. In a CNN interview last week — her first major sit-down since becoming the Democratic Party’s official nominee for president — she changed her earlier campaign position on whether the technique used to extract oil and natural gas should be banned. Cries of “Flip-flopper!” are a staple of shallow campaign coverage. The issue is a bit complicated, and could prove awkward in at least one battleground state. And she’d rather spend her limited time attacking Donald Trump on abortion and other issues where she has a clearer advantage.
But when the fracking issue comes up again — and it will — Harris has a great story to tell, one that most Americans are probably unaware of. There’s a green energy revolution underway, but rather than celebrate it, Harris and many other Democratic politicians tend to tiptoe around the issue, apparently terrified that a single infelicitous sentence could turn the supposedly large numbers of pro-fossil fuel voters against them.
We saw that dynamic in action on CNN, when interviewer Dana Bash homed right in on the fact that, running in the presidential primaries in 2020, Harris said she favored a ban on fracking. “Fracking, as you know, is a pretty big issue, particularly in your must-win state of Pennsylvania,” Bash said. “Do you still want to ban fracking?” Like almost every political reporter, Bash has no interest in the benefits and problems fracking presents, or whether banning it is a good or bad idea. The point is to zing Harris for her apparent flip-flop and speculate on whether it will move votes in one of the few swing states.
Harris was determined to allay the concerns of any pro-fracking voters tuning in. “I would not ban fracking,” she said. “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.” Loud and clear!
She did go on to argue that a fracking ban is unnecessary because the Inflation Reduction Act is creating large numbers of green energy jobs, so “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.” To the casual viewer, it probably seemed like a perfectly good answer, but it was also somewhat beside the point. The reason many would like to ban fracking isn’t that it holds back the creation of green jobs. It’s that it entrenches our reliance on fossil fuels and creates environmental and health problems in the areas where it is deployed.
Of course, all those considerations — jobs, the environment, and where we’re getting our energy now and in the future — are interrelated. Which is why there is an opportunity for Harris to use that question to focus voters’ attention on the transformation now taking place.
With one party saying the only thing that matters in energy is drilling for more fossil fuels and the other telling people not to worry because they won’t stop us drilling for more fossil fuels, how many Americans know about the dramatic increase in renewable energy, especially solar, that is now underway? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, nearly 50 gigawatts of solar power will be added to the grid this year, accounting for 59% of all new electricity generation:
Wind and solar now generate more electricity than coal. Even more remarkable is how inexpensive solar power has become. Since 1990, the price per kilowatt hour of a solar panel has dropped by 98%, and solar has become the least expensive type of new energy to generate. With all the innovation taking place in the renewable energy world — a good deal of it spurred by the investments made by the Biden administration — energy prices are likely to keep coming down as more and more of our power is generated by renewables.
This is a triumphant story of human ingenuity, thoughtful government action, and the operation of the free market. Harris could use it to describe a glorious future of power that is cheap, clean, and nearly limitless, one she is trying to create and Trump is trying to impede. Given that “We won’t go back” is one of her campaign slogans, it would seem like a perfect fit for her. But like many Democrats, she seems wary of saying anything that might spook the relatively small number of people whose livelihoods depend on fracking.
Consider Pennsylvania, the only swing state where this issue is supposed to matter. From the discussion in the political press, you might think the state’s voters are almost unanimous in their devotion to fracking, but that’s just not true. Even there, the public is closely divided on the issue: Some polls have found majorities of Pennsylvanians opposed to fracking, while others show them split down the middle. And while Pennsylvania produces a lot of natural gas that way, the number of people who actually work in fracking in the state is extremely modest, in the low five figures. Yet the assumption of news coverage is that the contrast between the Biden administration’s emphasis on clean energy and Trump’s opposite “Drill, baby, drill” approach can only redound to Trump’s benefit; as one Wall Street Journalarticle in April was headlined, “A Pennsylvania Fracking Boom Weighs on Biden’s Re-Election Chances.” The Pennsylvanians who are opposed to fracking because of its environmental impacts — or simply see it as something their state no longer needs — are shoved to the periphery of that kind of coverage.
So what if the next time she is asked about why she changed her mind about a fracking ban, Harris took the opportunity to explain to people what the future of energy is actually going to look like, and why it’s so encouraging? She’ll have to do that over the objection (or at the very least the indifference) of the reporters covering her campaign, who neither know nor care about the substance of the climate issue or energy policy. But she should do it anyway. Not only would it be right on the merits, it might even be good politics.