You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
“Ifwe actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers.”
It was always going to be the case that the vice presidential debate would have the most substantive climate exchange of the 2024 election cycle. For one (big) thing: Neither candidate was Donald Trump. For another, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance both have, at least at some point, professed concern about “the climate problem.” But a question from the moderators was all but guaranteed after one of the costliest hurricanes in recent U.S. history devastated communities far from the coast the weekend before the debate.
Rather than get just a few meager sentences about “immaculate clean water,” then, Americans who bothered to tune into the debate were treated to a lengthy back-and-forth about clean energy investment and the Inflation Reduction Act by the presidential candidates’ seconds. The exchange touched off when Vance was asked what responsibility the Trump administration would have “to try and reduce the impact of climate change,” especially given the scenes out of Western North Carolina.
“A lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” Vance said to start (though lest we forget, those “crazy weather patterns” just left 100 dead in six U.S. states and are expected to result in 250,000 excess deaths per year by 2050, according to the IPCC). He added that “Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water” but that “one of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions — this idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change.”
Who had on their Bingo card that Vance would be the first to mention carbon emissions during a debate in 2024? But he quickly turned the moment around to cast doubt on the human causes: “Let’s just say that’s true, for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science,” he added, though he proceeded to structure his remarks as if we live in a world where greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere (what a thought!):
If you believe that, what would you want to do?
The answer is that you want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.
Kamala Harris’ policies actually led to more energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world — when I say that, I mean the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output.
So if we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people.
Of course, what Vance is describing sounds suspiciously like the rationale behind the Inflation Reduction Act, which explicitly aims to build a green economy at home in the U.S. Walz more or less pointed that out in his response: “We’ve seen massive investments — the biggest in global history,” he said. “We’ve seen that the Inflation Reduction Act has created jobs all across the country,” including in manufacturing electric cars and solar panels.
Walz also noted that Trump has called climate change a hoax, which earned Vance a chance to respond. “If the Democrats — in particular, Kamala Harris and her leadership — if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America,” he reemphasized, then added: “If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you’ve got to invest in more energy production. We’ve built a nuclear facility — I think one in the past 40 years. Natural gas, we’ve got to invest more in it.”
The ball then returned to Walz. “We’re producing more natural gas than we ever had,” he correctly pointed out (and, though he didn’t mention it, Biden recently signed a big bill advancing nuclear, too). But while Trump hosted oil executives at Mar-a-Lago when he was courting campaign donations, “we can be smarter about that and an all-above energy policy,” the governor went on. “That’s exactly what this administration has done. We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current.”
Was it a perfect climate exchange? Not really. It’s easy to see why the oil industry is sweet on Vance and Walz’s citation of an “all-above energy policy” will likely leave some in the more progressive wings of the climate movement feeling cold.
But it will be described as an amicable exchange, particularly for moments like Walz telling Vance, “Well, we got close to an agreement” on recognizing so-called crazy weather patterns. In truth, they also got close to an agreement on a little something called the IRA — yet another case of a Republican trying to have it both ways. It goes to show: Climate jobs and domestic manufacturing are popular ideas with the American public. Just don’t tell your boss, JD.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
And how ordinary Americans will pay the price.
No one seems to know exactly how many employees have been laid off from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or, for that matter, what offices those employees worked at, what jobs they held, or what regions of the country will be impacted by their absence. We do know that it was a lot of people; about 10% of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at the agency have left since Donald Trump took office, either because they were among the 800 or so probationary employees to be fired late last month or because they resigned.
“I don’t have the specifics as to which offices, or how many people from specific geographic areas, but I will reiterate that every one of the six [NOAA] line offices and 11 of the staff offices — think of the General Counsel’s Office or the Legislative Affairs Office — all 11 of those staff offices have suffered terminations,” Rick Spinrad, who served as the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told reporters in a late February press call. (At least a few of the NOAA employees who were laid off have since been brought back.)
Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in recent comments about the NOAA layoffs, “This is going to have profound negative consequences on the day-to-day lives of Americans.” He added, “This is something that [Elon Musk’s government efficiency team] just doesn’t even understand. They simply have no idea what they are doing and how it’s hurting people.”
There is the direct harm to hard-working employees who have lost their jobs, of course. But there is also a more existential problem: Part of what is driving the layoffs is a belief by those in power that the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” according to the Project 2025 playbook. As one recently fired NOAA employee put it, “the goal is destruction,” and climate science is one of the explicit targets.
NOAA is a multifaceted organization, and monitoring climate change is far from its only responsibility. The agency researches, protects, and restores America’s fisheries, including through an enforcement arm that combats poaching; it explores the deep ocean and governs seabed mining; and its Commissioned Officer Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, alongside the Army, Marines Corps, and Coast Guard. But many of its well-known responsibilities almost inevitably touch climate change, from the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts and warnings to drought tools for farmers to heat forecasts from the National Weather Service issued on hot summer days. Cutting climate science out of NOAA would have immediate — and in some cases, deadly — impacts on regular Americans.
And it’s likely this is only the beginning of the purge. Project 2025 calls for the complete disbanding of NOAA. Current agency employees have reportedly been told to brace for “a 50% reduction in staff” as part of Elon Musk’s government efficiency campaign. Another 1,000 terminations are expected this week, bringing the total loss at NOAA to around 20% of its staff.
Here are just a few of the ways those layoffs are already impacting climate science.
NOAA collects more than 20 terabytes of environmental data from Earth and space daily, and through its paleoclimatology arm, it has reconstructed climate data going back 100 million years. Not even Project 2025 calls for the U.S. to halt its weather measurements entirely; in fact, Congress requires the collection of a lot of standard climate data.
But the NOAA layoffs are hampering those data collection efforts, introducing gaps and inconsistencies. For example, staffing shortages have resulted in the National Weather Service suspending weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska — and elsewhere — “indefinitely.” The Trump administration is also considering shuttering a number of government offices, including several of NOAA’s weather monitoring stations. Repairs of monitors and sensors could also be delayed by staff cuts and funding shortfalls — or not done at all.
Flawed and incomplete data results in degraded and imprecise forecasts. In an era of extreme weather, the difference of a few miles or degrees can be a matter of life or death.
In the case of climate science specifically, which looks at changes over much longer timescales than meteorology, “I think you could do science with the data we have now, if we can preserve it,” Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at Cornell University who uses NOAA data in his research, told me.
But therein lies the next problem: the threat that the government could take NOAA climate data down entirely.
Though data collection is in many cases mandated by Congress, Congress does not require that the public have access to that data. Though NOAA’s climate page is still live, the Environmental Protection Agency has already removed from its website the Keeling Curve tracker, the daily global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurement that Drilled notes is “one of the longest-running data projects in climate science.” Many other government websites that reference climate change have also gone dark. Solutions are complicated — “downloading” NOAA to preserve it, for example, would cost an estimated $500,000 in storage per month for an institution to host it.
“At the end of the day, if you’re a municipality or a community and you realize that some of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, you’ll want to adapt to it, whether you think it’s because of climate change or not,” Lehner said. “People want to have the best available science to adapt, and I think that applies to Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of communities across the country.” But if the Trump administration deletes NOAA websites, or the existing measurements it’s putting out are of poor quality, “it’s not going to be the best possible science to adapt moving forward,” Lehner added.
I wouldn’t want to be a NOAA scientist with the word “climate” attached to my title or work. The Trump administration has shown itself to be ruthless in eliminating references to words or concepts it opposes, including flagging pictures of the Enola Gay WWII airplane for removal from the Defense Department’s website in an effort to cut all references to the LGBT community from the agency.
“Climate science” is another Trump administration boogey-word, but the NOAA scientists who remain employed by the agency after the layoffs will still have to deal with the realities of a world warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. “Ultimately, what we’re dealing with are changes in our environment that impact ecosystems and humans, and whether you think these changes are driven by humans or not, it’s something that can now be seen in data,” Lehner told me. “From that perspective, I find it hard to believe that this is not something that people [in the government] are interested in researching.”
Government scientists who want to track things like drought or the rapid intensification of hurricanes going forward will likely have to do so without using the word “climate.” Lehner, for example, recalled submitting a proposal to work with the Bureau of Reclamation on the climate change effects on the Colorado River during the first Trump administration and being advised to replace words like “climate change” with more politically neutral language. His team did, and the project ultimately got funded, though Lehner couldn’t say if that was only because of the semantics. It seems likely, though, that Trump 2.0 will be even stricter in CTRL + F’ing “climate” at NOAA and elsewhere.
Climate research will continue in some form at NOAA, if only because that’s the reality of working with data of a warming planet. But scientists who don’t lose their jobs in the layoffs will likely find themselves wasting time on careful doublespeak so as not to attract unwanted attention.
Another major concern with the NOAA layoffs is the loss of expert knowledge. Many NOAA offices were already lean and understaffed, and only one or two employees likely knew how to perform certain tasks or use certain programs. If those experts subsequently lose their jobs, decades of NOAA know-how will be lost entirely.
As one example, late last year, NOAA updated its system to process grants, causing delays as its staff learned how to use the new program. Given the new round of layoffs, the odds are that some of the employees who may have finally figured out how to navigate the new procedure may have been let go. The problem gets even worse when it comes to specialized knowledge.
“Some of the expertise in processing [NOAA’s] data has been abruptly lost,” Lehner told me. “The people who are still there are scrambling to pick up and learn how to process that data so that it can then be used again.”
The worst outcome of the NOAA layoffs, though, is the extensive damage it does to the institution’s future. Some of the brightest, most enthusiastic Americans at NOAA — the probationary employees with under a year of work — are already gone. What’s more, there aren’t likely to be many new openings at the agency for the next generation of talent coming up in high school and college right now.
“We have an atmospheric science program [at Cornell University] where students have secured NOAA internships for this summer and were hoping to have productive careers, for example, at the National Weather Service, and so forth,” Lehner said. “Now, all of this is in question.”
That is hugely detrimental to NOAA’s ability to preserve the institutional knowledge of outgoing or retiring employees, or to build and advance a workforce of the future. It’s impossible to measure how many people ultimately leave the field or decide to pursue a different career because of the changes at NOAA — damage that will not be easily reversed under a new administration. “It’s going to take years for NOAA to recover the trust of the next generation of brilliant environmental scientists and policymakers,” Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, said.
Climate change is a global problem, and NOAA has historically worked with partner agencies around the world to better understand the impacts of the warming planet. Now, however, the Trump administration has ordered NOAA employees to stop their international work, and employees who held roles that involved collaboration with partners abroad could potentially become targets of Musk’s layoffs. Firing those employees would also mean severing their relationships with scientists in international offices — offices that very well could have been in positions to help protect U.S. citizens with their research and data.
As the U.S. continues to isolate itself and the NOAA layoffs continue, there will be cascading consequences for climate science, which is inherently a collaborative field. “When the United States doesn’t lead [on climate science], two things happen,” Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator of NOAA for research, recently told the press. “Other nations relax their own spending in these areas, and the world’s level of understanding starts to decline,” and “countries who we may not have as collegial an understanding with,” such as China, could ostensibly step in and “replace the United States and its leadership.”
That leaves NOAA increasingly alone, and Americans of all political stripes will suffer as a result. “The strategy to erase data and research, to pull the rug from under activism — it’s time-tested,” Lehner, the Cornell climate scientist, said. “But that’s where it’s very infuriating because NOAA’s data is bipartisanly useful.”