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Politics

What to Know About Vance’s Climate Stance

On Trump’s VP pick, Alaskan oil, and the pull of the moon

What to Know About Vance’s Climate Stance

Current conditions: A year’s worth of rain fell in one day in China’s Henan province • A tornado reportedly touched down outside Chicago’s O’Hare Airport • The heat index could reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit today in Washington, D.C.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump announces J.D. Vance as VP pick

Donald Trump has tapped Hillbilly Elegy author and Ohio junior senator J.D. Vance as his 2024 running mate. In recent years Vance has become a vocal climate change skeptic, casting doubt on the role of carbon emissions in warming the planet. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange and Matthew Zeitlin write, he is a champion of the fossil fuel industry, especially in his home state of Ohio, where his 2022 Senate campaign received generous backing from the oil and gas industry. He is also a prominent critic of the use of environmental, governance, and social standards in investing, otherwise known as ESG, which he has called “a racket to destroy what we still have so that a few people on Wall Street can make some money.”

Last year Vance introduced a bill that would repeal federal tax credits for EVs (Electreknoted that “Tesla’s stock erased 2% worth of gains following the VP pick announcement”), and another that would double maximum penalties for climate change protesters. He has called for greater exploitation of the Utica Shale, a geological formation that runs under Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York that contains an estimated 3 billion barrels of oil and natural gas. He has slammed President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act as “dumb” and said it only makes Americans poorer, but The New York Times notes that in the years since the IRA passed, Ohio alone has seen more than $12 billion in clean energy investment.

2. Biden administration considers more drilling protections in Alaska

The Biden administration may move to protect more land in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve from oil development, E&E Newsreported. The 23-million-acre reserve holds millions of barrels of oil and is where the contentious Willow oil project, run by ConocoPhillips, will be located. Other oil and gas companies are also eyeing the region for exploration, but environmentalists say “the region’s outsized vastness and ecological value” should be protected. More than 40 Indigenous communities rely on the resources and wildlife in the reserve. Earlier this year the Biden administration restricted new oil and gas leasing on 13 million acres of the reserve, and will soon invite the public to weigh in on whether more land should be protected. The Trump administration opened most of the reserve to fossil fuel exploration efforts in 2020, but Biden reversed that move in 2022.

3. Climate change could eventually be a greater influence than the moon on Earth’s rotation

For billions of years, the gravitational pull of the moon has tugged at the Earth’s oceans and slowed the planet’s rotation. In this way, our nearest celestial neighbor has been the dominant influence on the length of our days. But new research out of Switzerland concludes that human-caused climate change will “surpass the moon’s influence” in this respect, as huge amounts of water flow from the melting polar glaciers into the oceans toward the equator. The researchers estimate that if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t significantly reduced, the melting ice could lengthen days by 2.62 milliseconds a century by 2100. The melting is also altering the Earth’s axis of rotation, which is changing the dynamics of the Earth’s core. “We humans have a greater impact on our planet than we realize, and this naturally places great responsibility on us for the future of our planet,” said Benedikt Soja, professor of space geodesy at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zurich, and an author on the new research.

4. CO2 sequestration startup backed by Sam Altman raises $37 million

A carbon sequestration startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has raised $37 million in a Series A funding round led by Equinor Ventures. The company, 44.01, promises to trap CO2 underground and turn it into rock. It has already completed pilot and demonstration projects, Bloombergreported, and will use the funding to commercialize its technology in Oman and the United Arab Emirates and expand internationally. 44.01 is backed in part by Altman’s investment fund Apollo Projects, and won an Earthshot Prize in 2022.

5. Study: Indigenous communities help dramatically reduce deforestation in Amazon

The results of a new study underscore the important role Indigenous groups can play in helping to protect vulnerable environments. The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, used satellite imagery to examine deforestation levels in the Brazilian Amazon and found that areas protected by Indigenous communities had deforestation levels that were 83% lower compared to unprotected regions. The Amazon stores roughly 150 billion metric tons of carbon, so preserving its rainforest is important to protecting the climate. This study’s results “demonstrate that returning lands to Indigenous communities can be extremely effective at reducing deforestation and boosting biodiversity to help address climate change,” the authors wrote.

THE KICKER

Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered that wildfire smoke can have “unanticipated beneficial effects” on vulnerable conifer seedlings because it reduces the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground, thus protecting the young trees during extreme heat.

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Politics

AM Briefing: The Vote-a-Rama Drags On

On sparring in the Senate, NEPA rules, and taxing first-class flyers

The Megabill’s Clean Energy Holdouts
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A hurricane warning is in effect for Mexico as the Category 1 storm Flossie approaches • More than 50,000 people have been forced to flee wildfires raging in Turkey • Heavy rain caused flash floods and landslides near a mountain resort in northern Italy during peak tourist season.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Senate Republicans spar over megabill’s clean energy policies

Senate lawmakers’ vote-a-rama on the GOP tax and budget megabill dragged into Monday night and continues Tuesday. Republicans only have three votes to lose if they want to get the bill through the chamber and send it to the House. Already Senators Thom Tillis and Rand Paul are expected to vote against it, and there are a few more holdouts for whom clean energy appears to be one sticking point. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, has put forward an amendment (together with Iowa Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley) that would eliminate the new renewables excise tax, and phase out tax credits for solar and wind gradually (by 2028) rather than immediately, as proposed in the original bill. “I don’t want us to backslide on the clean energy credits,” Murkowski told reporters Monday. E&E News reported that the amendment could be considered on a simple majority threshold. (As an aside: If you’re wondering why wind and solar need tax credits if they’re so cheap, as clean energy advocates often emphasize, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has a nice explainer worth reading.)

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Climate Tech

Lyten Is Acquiring Northvolt’s Energy Storage Manufacturing ​Plant

It’s the largest facility of its kind of Europe and will immediately make the lithium-sulfur battery startup a major player.

A Lyten battery in Poland.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Lyten

Lyten, the domestic lithium-sulfur battery company, has officially expanded into the European market, announcing that it has acquired yet another shuttered Northvolt facility. Located in Gdansk, Poland, this acquisition represents a new direction for the company: Rather than producing battery cells — as Lyten’s other U.S.-based facilities will do — this 270,000 square foot plant is designed to produce complete battery energy storage systems for the grid. Currently, it’s the largest energy storage manufacturing facility in Europe, with enough equipment to ramp up to 6 gigawatt-hours of capacity. This gives Lyten the ability to become — practically immediately — a major player in energy storage.

“We were very convinced that we needed to be able to build our own battery energy storage systems, so the full system with electronics and switch gear and safety systems and everything for our batteries to go into,” Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability and marketing officer, told me. “So this opportunity became very, very well aligned with our strategy.”

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Energy

If Wind and Solar Are So Cheap, Why Do They Need Tax Credits?

Removing the subsidies would be bad enough, but the chaos it would cause in the market is way worse.

Money and clean energy.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

In their efforts to persuade Republicans in Congress not to throw wind and solar off a tax credit cliff, clean energy advocates have sometimes made what would appear to be a counterproductive argument: They’ve emphasized that renewables are cheap and easily obtainable.

Take this statement published by Advanced Energy United over the weekend: “By effectively removing tax credits for some of the most affordable and easy-to-build energy resources, Congress is all but guaranteeing that consumers will be burdened with paying more for a less reliable electric grid.”

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