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 (Electrek noted 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 News reported. 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, Bloomberg reported, 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.