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Let’s play out what could happen as the House Ways and Means Committee does its work.
One of the most important fights over the Inflation Reduction Act’s survival has finally arrived. But it’s not playing out in the open. It’s happening behind the closed doors of a powerful House committee in charge of tax policy.
The House Ways and Means Committee is writing its version of Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill, the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. The committee could release that text as soon as mid-May. And other than a few broad outlines — the text will extend Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, and it will increase the deficit by no more than $2.8 trillion — nobody has any idea what it will say.
Whatever the final text, though, will give us the first real sense of how likely the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits are to survive in the Trump tax bill. After months of speculation and tea leaf-reading, the House Ways and Means Committee’s draft will represent an opening position of sorts for Republican leadership — and illustrate just how close to repeal the majority is willing to get.
The committee could take a scorched-earth approach, cutting essentially every IRA tax credit in order to force members to fight to get policies back into the final bill. Or it could reform some tax credits so significantly that it effectively repeals the IRA, even if many policies remain on the books.
It could also reform some credits — such as the electric vehicle and clean electricity tax credits — while leaving most others untouched.
The most important suggestion of what will be in the final version came on Thursday in a new letter addressed to Jason Smith, the Ways and Means Committee chairman, and signed by 38 House Republicans. The letter demands the IRA’s full repeal — essentially heralding a potential new “anti-IRA” caucus within the GOP.
“We are deeply concerned that President Trump’s commitment to restoring American energy dominance and ending what he calls the ’‘green new scam’ is being undermined by parochial interests and short-sighted political calculations,” the letter says.
The letter writers focus their ire on subsidies for “wind and biofuel[s] … carbon capture and hydrogen … [and] solar and electric vehicles” that they say form the backbone of the bill.
So far, House Republicans have largely written letters about the IRA to call for its preservation. Last summer, 18 House Republicans wrote to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to ask him to move gingerly around any “repeal or reform” of the tax credits should Republicans win the November election.
“We must reverse the policies which refine American families while protecting and refining those that are making our country more energy independent and America more energy secure,” the letter said.
Since then, the number of pro-IRA voices in the GOP has risen. Last month, 21 House Republicans wrote to Johnson again in support of the law. But their language was slightly changed, advising that any reforms proceed in a “targeted and pragmatic fashion.” They did, however, oppose “premature credit phase outs” or restrictions on transferability.
Speaking earlier this week at a Semafor event, the Illinois Republican and Ways and Means member Darin LaHood imagined phasing out some of the energy tax credits earlier.
“The approach we’'re looking at now is how you have an appropriate ramp-down [of IRA tax credits] that allows for businesses and companies to continue to be active in this space, but also saves money," LaHood said.
He added that there is a “bullseye” on the clean energy law, and said that “we’ll see” whether any of its provisions are preserved.
Whatever form the final law takes, this legislative vehicle will likely determine the fate of the IRA’s energy tax credits and other climate spending. Trump has lambasted the IRA, and some Republicans believe that its tax credits should be repealed to pay for their tax cuts for wealthy earners.
Ways and Means will not automatically control the final product. Ultimately, they will have to reconcile their version of the text with what’s written by their counterpart, the Senate Finance Committee. Other committees will oversee the IRA’s environmental grants and loans. (My colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote about the first markup — from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee — on Tuesday.) But the Senate has a more forgiving budget target than the House does, which means the Ways and Means Committee is where the IRA could go to die. That’s because it oversees tax policy — and therefore manages the IRA’s all-important tax credits.
The committee also has a spending problem. The legislative process Republicans have chosen to pass their budget bill, known as reconciliation, begins with establishing binding spending limits for committees in both the House and the Senate. That process wrapped up last month.
Under the guidelines passed by the House earlier this year, the Ways and Means Committee can expand the deficit by as much as $4.5 trillion. But simply extending the 2017 tax cuts’ expiring provisions will cost $4.4 trillion — and the committee wants to do more besides, including expanding the deductions that people can claim for their local and state taxes. The committee will struggle to pay for everything it wants to do — and it could look to repealing parts of the IRA to fix it.
It doesn’t help that Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, the Ways and Means chairman, has called the IRA “welfare for the wealthy and well-connected.”
The committee’s conservative bent — and the fact that GOP lawmakers broadly want to stay on track to pass a bill by the end of the summer — mean that the IRA tax cuts are especially vulnerable during this period.
Most of the IRA’s tax credits are due to sunset in 2032. But one measure — a technology-neutral credit to support new clean electricity generation — could run for much longer than that.
Under the law as it stands today, that credit is supposed to last until the United States eliminates much of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by its power grid as compared to 2022 levels. Even if the credit remains in place, that could take another 30 or 40 years to happen, by one estimate — making the tech-neutral tax credit one of the most important climate policies in the law. The IRA’s power sector policies are responsible for more than 80% of the law’s emissions-reducing impact.
That also makes it among the most expensive policies in the law. When Republicans talk about ending tax credits early, the tech-neutral tax credit is an obvious target. Two lawmakers from North Dakota — Representative Julie Fedorchak and Senator Kevin Cramer — are working on language to phase out some tax credits in five years, Axios Pro has reported.
That would shut down the credit by 2030. But ending the credit by then could reshape what kind of energy technologies the law supports. Republicans tend not to see all zero-carbon electricity equally — while they often champion nuclear and advanced geothermal generation, many look less favorably on wind and solar power.
But by terminating the tech-neutral tax credit at the end of the decade, Republicans could help essentially the very technologies they don’t want. There are no new nuclear or geothermal projects in the development pipeline across the country, and new ones are unlikely to crop up until the late 2020s at the earliest. Under the law, energy projects must be “placed in service” by the time a tax credit expires, meaning that virtually no new nuclear or geothermal projects could qualify.
New nuclear projects will face especially serious trouble if the Trump administration guts the Department of Energy’s in-house bank, the Loan Programs Office, as now seems likely.
At the same time, there are plenty of new solar and battery projects planned across the country. Developers of these projects could rush to get them into service before a potential 2029 sunset date. The industry even has experience hurrying projects to completion: It often had to do so during the 2010s, when the solar investment tax credit faced repeated expirations.
Other Republicans have suggested terminating the law’s transferability clause. Under the IRA as it stands today, companies can sell their tax credits to other firms that can better use the subsidy. Depending on how it’s implemented, that reform could hurt the IRA by reducing the value of its tax credits, because companies will have to adopt more complicated financial structures in order to claim a given subsidy. Historically, solar and wind developers have more experience adopting these arcane structures than the nuclear or geothermal industries, which have fewer projects under their belt.
Speaking at a Heatmap event on Thursday, Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah said he was still hopeful that the IRA would survive without significant cuts.
“I don’t think that makes it through the House,” he said when asked if the Ways and Means Committee could slash the IRA tax credits outright. “There’s a lot of insecurities in the Republican Party about not cutting and about where the boundaries are.”
We’ll have a much better sense of where those boundaries are soon.
Editor’s note: Updates to reflect Ways and Means delaying its markup.
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You’ve probably noticed — even Trump has noticed — but the reason why is as complicated as the grid itself.
You’re not imagining things: Electricity prices are surging.
Electricity rates, which have increased steadily since the pandemic, are now on a serious upward tear. Over the past 12 months, power prices have increased more than twice as fast as inflation, according to recent government data. They will likely keep rising in years to come as new data centers and factories connect to the power grid.
That surge is a major problem for the economy — and for President Trump. On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to cut Americans’ electricity bills in half within his first year in office. “Your electric bill — including cars, air conditioning, heating, everything, your total electric bill — will be 50% less. We’re going to cut it in half,” he said.
Now Trump has mysteriously stopped talking about that pledge, and on Tuesday he blamed renewables for rising electricity rates. Even Trump’s Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has acknowledged that costs are doing the opposite of what the president has promised.
Trump’s promise to cut electricity rates in half was always ridiculous. But while his administration is likely making the electricity crisis worse, the roots of our current power shock did not begin in January.
Why has electricity gotten so much more expensive over the past five years? The answer, despite what the president might say, isn’t renewables. It has far more to do with the part of the power grid you’re most familiar with: the poles and wires outside your window.
Before we begin, a warning: Electricity prices are weird.
In most of the U.S. economy, markets set prices for goods and services in response to supply and demand. But electricity prices emerge from a complicated mix of regulation, fuel costs, and wholesale auction. In general, electricity rates need to cover the costs of running the electricity system — and that turns out to be a complicated task.
You can split costs associated with the electricity system into three broad segments. The biggest and traditionally the most expensive part of the grid is generation — the power plants and the fuels needed to run them. The second category is transmission, which moves electricity across long distances and delivers it to local substations. The final category is distribution, the poles and wires that get electricity the “the last mile” to homes and businesses. (You can think of transmission as the highways for electricity and distribution as the local roads.)
In some states, especially those in the Southeast and Mountain West, monopoly electricity companies run the entire power grid — generation, transmission, and distribution. A quasi-judicial body of state officials regulates what this monopoly can do and what it can charge consumers. These monopoly utilities are supposed to make long-term decisions in partnership with these state commissions, and they must get their permission before they can raise electricity rates. But when fuel costs go up for their power plants — such as when natural gas or oil prices spike — they can often “pass through” those costs directly to consumers.
In other states, such as California or those in the Mid-Atlantic, electricity bills are split in two. The “generation” part of the bill is set through regulated electricity auctions that feature many different power plants and power companies. The market, in other words, sets generation costs. But the local power grid — the infrastructure that delivers electricity to customers — cannot be handled by a market, so it is managed by utilities that cover a particular service area. These local “transmission and distribution” utilities must get state regulators’ approval when they raise rates for their part of the bill.
The biggest driver of the power grid’s rising costs is … the power grid itself.
Historically, generation — building new power plants, and buying the fuel to run them — has driven the lion’s share of electricity rates. But since the pandemic, the cost of building the distribution system has ballooned.
Electricity costs are “now becoming a wires story and less of an electrons story,” Madalsa Singh, an economist at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me. In 2023, distribution made up nearly half of all utility spending, up from 37% in 2019, according to a recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report.
Where are these higher costs coming from? When you look under the hood, the possibly surprising answer is: the poles and wires themselves. Utilities spent roughly $6 billion more on “overhead poles, towers, and conductors” in 2023 than in 2019, according to the Lawrence Berkeley report. Spending on underground power lines — which are especially important out West to avoid sparking a wildfire — increased by about $4 billion over the same period.
Spending on transformers also surged. Transformers, which connect different circuits on the grid and keep the flow of electricity constant, are a crucial piece of transmission and distribution infrastructure. But they’ve been in critically short supply more or less since the supply chain crunch of the pandemic. Utility spending on transformers has more than doubled since 2019, according to Wood Mackenzie.
At least some of the costs are hitting because the grid is just old, Singh said. As equipment reaches the end of its life, it needs to be upgraded and hardened. But it’s not completely clear why that spike in distribution costs is happening now as opposed to in the 2010s, when the grid was almost as old and in need of repair as it was now.
Some observers have argued that for-profit utilities are “goldplating” distribution infrastructure, spending more on poles and wires because they know that customers will ultimately foot the bill for them. But when Singh studied California power companies, she found that even government-run utilities — i.e. utilities without private investors to satisfy — are now spending more on distribution than they used to, too. Distribution costs, in other words, seem to be going up for everyone.
Sprawling suburbs in some states may be driving some of those costs, she added. In California, people have pushed farther out into semi-developed or rural land in order to find cheaper housing. Because investor-owned utilities have a legal obligation to get wires and electricity to everyone in their service area, these new and more distant housing developments might be more expensive to connect to the grid than older ones.
These higher costs will usually appear on the “transmission and distribution” part of your power bill — the “wires” part, if it is broken out. What’s interesting is that as a share of total utility investment, virtually all of the cost inflation is happening on the distribution side of that ledger. While transmission costs have fluctuated year to year, they have hovered around 20% of total utility investment since 2019, according to the Lawrence Berkeley Labs report.
Higher transmission spending might eventually bring down electricity rates because it could allow utilities to access cheaper power in neighboring service areas — or connect to distant solar or wind projects. (If renewables were driving up power prices as the president claims, you might see it here, in the “transmission” part of the bill.) But Charles Hua, the founder and executive director of the think tank PowerLines, said that even now, most utilities are building out their local grids, not connecting to power projects that are farther away.
The second biggest driver of higher electricity costs is disasters — natural and otherwise.
In California, ratepayers are now partially footing the bill for higher insurance costs associated with the risk of a grid-initiated wildfire, Sam Kozell, a researcher at the E9 Insight, told me. Utilities also face higher costs whenever they rebuild the grid after a wildfire because they install sensors and software in their infrastructure that might help avoid the next blaze.
Similar stories are playing out elsewhere. Although the exact hazards vary region by region, some utilities and power grids have had to pay steep costs to rebuild from disasters or prevent the likelihood of the next one occurring.
In the Southeast, for instance, severe storms and hurricanes have knocked out huge swaths of the distribution grid, requiring emergency line crews to come in and rebuild. Those one-time, storm-induced costs then get recovered through higher utility rates over time.
Why have costs gone up so much this decade? Wildfires seem to grow faster now because of climate change — but wildfires in California are also primed to burn by a century of built-up fuel in forests. The increased disaster costs may also be partially the result of the bad luck of where storms happen to hit. Relatively few hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. during the 2010s — just 13, most of which happened in the second half of the decade. Eleven hurricanes have already come ashore in the 2020s.
Because fuel costs are broadly seen as outside a utility’s control, regulators generally give utilities more leeway to pass those costs directly through to customers. So when fuel prices go up, so do rates in many cases.
The most important fuel for the American power grid is natural gas, which produces more than 40% of American electricity. In 2022, surging demand and rising European imports caused American natural gas prices to increase more than 140%. But it can take time for a rise of that magnitude to work its way to consumers, and it can take even longer for electricity prices to come back down.
Although natural gas prices returned to pre-pandemic levels by 2023, utilities paid 30% more for fuel and energy that year than they did in 2019, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. That’s because higher fuel costs do not immediately get processed in power bills.
The ultimate impact of these price shocks can be profound. North Carolina’s electricity rates rose from 2017 to 2024, for instance, largely because of natural gas price hikes, according to an Environmental Defense Fund analysis.
The final contributor to higher power costs is the one that has attracted the most worry in the mainstream press: There is already more demand for electricity than there used to be.
A cascade of new data centers coming onto the grid will use up any spare electron they can get. In some regions, such as the Mid-Atlantic’s PJM power grid, these new data centers are beginning to drive up costs by increasing power prices in the capacity market, an annual auction to lock in adequate supply for moments of peak demand. Data centers added $9.4 billion in costs last year, according to an independent market monitor.
Under PJM’s rules, it will take several years for these capacity auction prices to work their way completely into consumer prices — but the process has already started. Hua told me that the power bill for his one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., has risen over the past year thanks largely to these coming demand shocks. (The Mid-Atlantic grid implemented a capacity-auction price cap this year to try to limit future spikes.)
Across the country, wherever data centers have been hooked up to the grid but have not supplied or purchased their own around-the-clock power, costs will probably rise for consumers. But it will take some time for those costs to be felt.
In order to meet that demand, utilities and power providers will need to build more power plants, transmission lines, and — yes — poles and wires in the years to come. But recent Trump administration policies will make this harder. The reconciliation bill’s termination of wind and solar tax credits, its tariffs on electrical equipment, and a new swathe of anti-renewable regulations will make it much more expensive to add new power capacity to the strained grid. All those costs will eventually hit power bills, too, even if it takes a few years.
“We're just getting started in terms of price increases, and nothing the federal administration is doing ‘to assure American energy dominance’ is working in the right direction,” Kozell said. “They’re increasing all the headwinds.”
Big electric vehicles need big batteries — and as electricity gets more expensive, charging them is getting pricier.
As the cost to charge the Rivian R1S ticked up over $50, then $60, I couldn’t help but recall those “Pain at the Pump” segments from the local news. Perhaps you’ve seen the familiar clips where reporters camp out at the local filling station to interview locals fed up with high gas prices. I watched the Rivian charger’s touchscreen as the cost to refuel my weekend test-driver ballooned and imagined the chemically dewrinkled TV anchors doing their first story on “Pain at the Plug.”
I should have been ready for this. Back in the 90s, I remember the shock of filling my parents’ gas-guzzling Ford Explorer, which cost two or three times as much as it took to fill my dinky Escort hatchback. The story isn’t the same in the age of electric vehicles, but it rhymes. It rarely costs more than $20 to top off the small battery in my Tesla Model 3, so my eyes popped a little at the price of refueling a massive EV.
This isn’t a one-to-one comparison, of course: the R1S also goes farther on a charge because of how much energy its huge battery can store, so it’s a bit like comparing a compact car to a Ford F-150 and its 36-gallon gas tank — you’re spending much, much, more, but you’re going a little farther, too. Still, it is a reminder that size matters, whether you’re talking about gas or electric. Under a Trump administration where electricity prices are forecasted to spike, EV shoppers might find themselves thinking the way Americans often have during oil crises and gas price hikes: taking a long look at smaller and lighter vehicles to save money.
The EV weight problem is well-known. To summarize: EVs tend to be weighty because of their massive battery packs. Making electrified versions of the big trucks and SUVs Americans love amplifies the problem. You need very big batteries to store enough energy to give them a decent range, and adding a large lithium-ion unit along the bottom adds even more girth.
Weighty EVs have raised concerns over public safety, since they could be more dangerous to pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars during collisions. Their bulk leads to prematurely worn-out tires, which potentially creates more tire dust and forces drivers to replace their rubber sooner. Bigger batteries need larger amounts of rare metals to make them. And now, in a world of expensive electricity, a heavy EV could hammer a driver’s wallet.
Those of us raised on miles per gallon must learn a new statistical vocabulary to think about the efficiency of EVs. The simplest stat is the number of miles traveled per kilowatt-hour of energy. Lucid, the luxury EV-only startup, has been gunning for the efficiency title with its streamlined Air sedan and has bragged about making 5 miles per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, the current Tesla Model 3 makes around 4 miles per kilowatt-hour, while a big, heavy Rivian gets somewhere in the 2s. (Using a conversion formula from the Environmental Protection Agency to calculate the energy present in a gallon of gas shows that a relatively efficient sedan like the Honda Civic scores around 1, by Lucid’s math, and a big pickup truck even worse.)
These numbers are context-dependent, of course. Just as a gas car or hybrid is judged by its city, highway, and combined mileage, an electric car goes much farther at slow speeds than it does on the highway. A big three-row Hyundai Ioniq 9 EV that can deliver 3 miles or more per kilowatt-hour at slower speeds made right around 2.0 when I sped down Interstate 5, the AC blasting to keep the baby comfortable on a hot California day. The Supercharger bill was enough to make me miss my little Tesla.
The dollars-and-cents calculation is a little different with all-electric vehicles than it was in the all-gasoline era. Drive a gas car and you pay whatever the gas station charges; there is little recourse beyond knowing which service station in your city is the cheapest. With EVs, however, most drivers do their charging primarily at home, where the cost per kilowatt-hour for residential energy is much lower than the inflated cost to refill the battery at a public fast-charger. (Even California’s high cost for home electricity amounts to just half of what some EV fast-chargers cost during afternoon and evening times of peak demand.) But there’s no way to beat the system entirely. Drive a giant, electron-guzzling EV and you’ll be much more vulnerable to a spike in electricity prices.
And it’s not just the cost of recharging a battery — size also matters a lot for the up-front cost of the EV. Americans have become accustomed to paying a premium for larger vehicles, but for combustion cars, this is simply a market phenomenon. It doesn’t cost that much more to build a crossover instead of a sedan, or to give a vehicle a bigger gas tank. The car companies know you’ll pay thousands more for a Toyota RAV4 than for a Corolla. With electric vehicles, however, you’re paying for size in a much more direct fashion. That huge battery needed to move a Rivian is simply much more expensive to build than the one in a Chevy Bolt.
Carmakers are now confronting this problem as they try to crack the affordable EV problem. A subtle detail in Ford’s big announcement last week that it would build a $30,000 mid-size electric pickup is that the vehicle would have a battery perhaps half as big as the one in the F-150 Lightning EV and four times smaller than the biggest one you can get with Chevy’s Silverado EV.
Building a truck with a relatively small battery will undoubtedly slash costs compared to the monster units we’ve seen in full-size electric pickups. It also means that Ford will have to be especially conscious of the vehicle’s weight to maximize the range that can be squeezed out of those few kilowatt-hours. Until battery production costs tumble, that is the way to the more-affordable EV — do more with less.
On COP30 jitters, a coal mega-merger gone bust, and NYC airport workers get heated
Current conditions: Hurricane Erin is lashing Virginia Beach with winds up to 80 miles per hour, the Mid-Atlantic with light rain, and New York City with deadly riptides • Europe’s wildfires have now burned more land than any blazes in two decades • Catastrophic floods have killed more than 300 in Pakistan and at least 50 in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Offshore oil rigs in California. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Two weeks after de-designating millions of acres of federal waters to offshore wind development, the Trump administration Tuesday set a new schedule for auctions of oil-and-gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet, stretching all the way out to 2040. In a press release, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum cited the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act as a “landmark step toward unleashing America’s energy potential” by “putting in place a bold, long-term program that strengthens American Energy Dominance, creates good-paying jobs and ensure we continue to responsibly develop our offshore resources.”
The lease plan may violate federal law, however, as the administration has not conducted environmental analyses or held public hearings before putting the auctions on the calendar. “There’s no world in which we will allow the Trump Administration to hold dozens of oil sales in public waters, putting Americans, wildlife, and the planet in harm’s way, without abiding by the law,” Brettny Hardy, an oceans attorney at the environmental group Earthjustice, said in a statement. “Even with its passage of the worst environmental bill in U.S. history, the Republican-led Congress did not exempt these offshore oil sales from needing to comply with our nation’s environmental statutes.”
In an open letter published Tuesday, André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat leading the next United Nations climate summit, warned that “geopolitical and economic obstacles are raising new challenges to international cooperation — including under the climate regime.” The letter comes after UN-sponsored talks over a plastics treaty collapsed last week, with the U.S. joining fellow oil producers Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran in standing athwart more than 100 other countries that supported a deal to curb production of new disposable plastics.
The climate summit, known as COP30, is set to take place in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém in November. It will be the first global climate confab since President Donald Trump returned to office and, on his first day back in the White House, kicked off the process to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate deal.
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Peabody Energy backed out of its $3.8 billion agreement to buy Anglo American’s coal mines following the unexpected closure of the deal’s flagship mine. On Tuesday, the largest U.S. coal producer said that an explosion last March at Anglo America’s Moranbah North mine in Australia resulted in a “material adverse change” to its deal. The move dealt a major blow to London-based Anglo American, which had planned to use the sale as part of a broader restructuring to fend off a hostile takeover attempt by rival BHP. Anglo American CEO Duncan Wanblad said he was “very disappointed,” according to the Financial Times, and the company said it would “seek damages for the wrongful termination.”
The deal comes amid a global comeback for the main fuel blamed for climate change. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “the evidence for coal’s stubborn persistence globally has been mounting for years. In 2021, the International Energy Agency forecast that by 2024, annual coal demand would hit an all-time high of just over 8,000 megatons. In 2024, it reported that coal demand in 2023 was already at 8,690 megatons, a new record; it also pushed out its prediction for a demand plateau to 2027, at which point it predicted annual demand would be 8,870 megatons.”
The California startup ChemFinity got a big boost on Tuesday, raising $7 million in a funding round led by At One Ventures and Overton Ventures. The company, spun out from the University of California, Berkeley, claims its critical mineral recovery system will be three times cheaper, 99% cleaner and 10 times faster than existing approaches currently found in the mining and recycling industries. “We basically act like a black box where recyclers or scrap yards or even other refiners can send their feedstock to us,” Adam Uliana, ChemFinity’s co-founder and CEO, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “We act like a black box that spits out pure metal.”
At a time when record heat is regularly halting flights on sweltering tarmacs, service workers at New York City’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports are slated to protest on Wednesday to demand new workplace protections from extreme heat. The workers, many of whom handle cargo and ramp services for major airlines, said in a press release that extreme heat and lack of access to water, rest breaks, and proper training threatened more incidents of heat illness. One worker claimed to have recently lost consciousness inside the cargo hold of a plane due to heat. The members of chapter 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union will be joined by State Assemblymembers Steven Raga and Catalina Cruz in their demonstration, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. near LaGuardia’s Old Marine Terminal.
I swear by the shvitz. My great grandfather, after whom I’m named, went to the same Russian bathhouse in Manhattan that my cousin, brother, and I visit regularly to enjoy the sauna and cold plunge. Turns out amphibians feel the same. A researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney found that frogs could fight off the deadly chytrid fungal infection plaguing the green and golden bell frog by sitting in “frog saunas.” Spending a few hours a day in warm enclosures that reach temperatures higher than 83 degrees Fahrenheit for a week or less is all that’s needed to kill off the fungus.