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Kamala Harris quickly rang up endorsements from Democratic elected officials and convention delegates Sunday afternoon after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign, making Vice President Harris the likeliest Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States. Many of these plaudits came from figures in the climate policy space, but few were quite as vociferous as the one from Gina McCarthy, a director of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama and White House climate advisor under Biden.
“Vice President Harris would kick ass against Trump,” she said in a statement. “She has spent her whole life committed to justice, fighting for the underdog, and making sure that no one is above the law. She will fight every day for all Americans to have access to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment.”
When Harris has had the chance to formulate climate action on her own — as the attorney general of California, as a U.S. senator, as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 — it has tended to be aggressive in its timelines for decarbonization and heavily focused on the harms that fossil fuel extraction and processing inflict on marginalized communities.
As vice president, however, she has been subsumed into the rollout of both the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In some cases, the programs she’s pitched and praised have an organic connection to her own personal policy work — a grant program for electric school buses, for instance, the launch of which was the source of one of her more enduring Kamala-isms: “Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus?”
Assuming she wins the party’s nomination and then, finally, the White House, a Kamala Harris climate agenda would no doubt look much like Biden’s. To people who’ve been paying attention all along, however, there’s no reason to think she couldn’t push the country even more zealously toward decarbonizing.
For one, there’s the historical record. Harris not only endorsed Green New Deal legislation in 2019, she also put out a climate plan during her campaign that included $10 trillion of public and private spending and called for reaching net-zero by 2045, achieving a carbon neutral electric grid by 2030, no new fossil fuel leasing on public lands, and a carbon pollution fee. While expansive, Harris’s plan was not the work of someone like Jay Inslee, who has legislated on climate for years, or Bernie Sanders, who was willing to simply outbid his fellow candidates on progressive policy, but her climate policy was the process of consulting with climate activists. In fact, her team had reached out to Inslee’s after he dropped out for advice on climate, Jamal Raad, Inslee’s campaign communications director, told me.
“If we jump in the Wayback Machine, [Harris] was one of the most ambitious presidential candidates in the 2020 primary cycle,” Justin Guay, program director at Quadrature Climate Foundation, told me. “She had the largest proposed spending plan of any candidate not named Bernie. She promised a sum 10 times that of the greatest climate president we’ve ever had, Joe Biden.” Importantly, he added, she focused on “sticks, not just carrots,” including investigating and bringing lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, as she’d done in California. This, he said, is “red meat for the climate base.”
Where she did stand out in the Senate, on the campaign trail, and in the Biden administration was in her focus on environmental justice, an issue combining green politics and racial justice that she used to reach out to the party’s left wing. By the time the she was picked to be President Biden’s vice presidential nominee, she had won the praise of both the youth-led Sunrise Movement (which has since protested outside her Southern California home and notably withheld its support from Biden during his reelection campaign) and Evergreen Action, a climate policy group built by former Inslee staffers. “She made environmental justice central to her climate plans on the presidential campaign,” said Raad, an Evergreen Action cofounder.
In the summer of 2019, she joined up with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a bill that would have required all climate-related legislation to undergo a review of its effect on “frontline communities,” those living adjacent to energy-related facilities, which tend to be disproportionately populated by poor people of color, and created offices of climate equity within the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget.
While this particular piece of legislation went nowhere, the motivating ideas have been all over the Biden-Harris White House’s policy agenda — in tax benefits directed toward projects in “energy communities;” in the Justice40 Initiative, which aims to direct 40% of climate and related spending to flow toward disadvantaged communities; and in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a.k.a. “green banks,” aimed at making climate-friendly investing more affordable.
That’s all great, Raad told me. But he also added, “What’s more relevant has been how central she’s made climate in her vice presidency as one of her top priorities.” Harris reached out to Raad and others in the run-up to the IRA’s passage, he said. “She held a town hall. She barnstormed the country. As far as folks wanting further momentum in the next presidency, that’s the more relevant development — that she wanted to be associated with climate action.”
Whatever her policy priorities as president, they would have to fit between the lines of what would be, at best, narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress, limited by the filibuster and reconciliation process, along with large policy shifts that any new administration will have to deal with, such as the expiration of key portions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2025. It will be a far distance from the heady days of the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, when Harris eagerly participated in a bidding war between the candidates for the most aggressive and expansive climate program — less Frank Capra, more Alan J. Pakula.
“The reality is that the climate movement should focus as much, if not more, on creating the conditions that force politicians to act on climate as we do pushing for candidates with a hawkish climate policy platform to begin with,” Guay told me. “That was the greatest lesson from the Joe Biden era. He was no climate hawk when he entered the 2020 primaries,” but thanks to decades of unrelenting pressure and calls for more policy ambition, “he emerged the most powerful climate president we’ve ever had.”
Raad, too, emphasized the importance of realpolitik at this point in history. Having a president willing to put herself on the line for climate policy is important — “even if we don’t get major legislation done,” he told me. “We need to make sure the IRA is implemented effectively in the fullest way possible. We need a very careful eye towards writing regulations that are as effective as possible so they’re not getting overturned by Federalist Society judges.” Getting money out the door will be key, he said, “and that’s why we need an advocate in the White House.”
With assistance from Jeva Lange and Robinson Meyer.
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Current conditions: Severe flooding in west and central Africa has displaced nearly one million people • Brazil is choking on wildfire smoke that can be seen from space • Shanghai was struck by Typhoon Bebinca, the strongest storm to hit the city in 75 years.
Flooding across central and eastern Europe has killed at least 10 people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate. Since late last week, the slow-moving Storm Boris has dumped huge amounts of rain on the region, causing dams to burst and rivers to overflow and inundating communities in Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Parts of eastern Germany are also on alert. In the Austrian capital of Vienna, the Wien River’s water level rose from about 20 inches to more than seven feet in the course of a day. Meanwhile some mountain regions received more than three feet of snow. In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk today declared a state of natural disaster. According to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, the floods could be the worst since 2002.
Flooding in ViennaChristian Bruna/Getty Images
The European Environment Agency has warned that flooding is likely to be “one of the most serious effects from climate change in Europe over coming decades.”
Both U.S. coasts are experiencing wild weather but of very different kinds. The National Hurricane Center issued tropical storm warnings for the Carolinas as “Tropical Cyclone Eight” approaches with 50 mph winds. The system could bring up to 8 inches of rain and flash floods. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, parts of California are expecting snow. The state issued its earliest snow advisory in 20 years for the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where up to 4 inches could fall through Monday afternoon.
With COP29 now less than two months away, key players are working hard to lay the groundwork for the outcomes they’d like to see from the annual climate summit. Here are some recent developments:
A recent study finds that the risk of weather-related supply chain disruptions will rise more in the U.S. than in any other country over the next 15 years. This is because the country is starting from a pretty low baseline risk, thanks to the interconnectivity of all the states. “If a heatwave or period of extreme rainfall hits one part of the U.S., it is easily able to import goods and services from other areas,” CarbonBrief explained. But the risk won’t stay that low forever, and indeed the authors note that the U.S. “is subject to the strongest relative increases in consumption risks” through 2040 as weather shocks increase.
Tesla sold 5,175 Cybertrucks in July, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. Sales of all other EV pickups combined during that month reached 5,546. Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor and energy systems engineering expert (and co-host of Heatmap’s climate podcast Shift Key) predicted back in December that the Cybertruck would be crushed by EV pickup rivals like the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian’s R1. But now…
The U.S. Postal Service recently started rolling out its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric. The vehicles may not be beautiful, but as Paul Waldman argued for Heatmap, if you want to normalize EVs, “what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?”
Isometric is trying to become the most trusted name in the scandal-plagued carbon market.
Regulations are probably coming for the scandal-plagued voluntary carbon market. After years of mounting skepticism and reports of greenwashing, governments are now attempting to rein in the historically unchecked web of platforms, registries, protocols, and verification bodies offering ways to offset a company’s emissions that vary tremendously in price and quality. Europe has developed its own rules, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, while the Biden administration earlier this year announced a less comprehensive set of general principles. Plus, there are already mandatory carbon credit schemes around the world, such as California’s cap-and-trade program and the E.U. Emissions Trading System.
“The idea that a voluntary credit should be a different thing than a compliance credit, obviously doesn’t make sense, right?” Ryan Orbuch, Lowercarbon Capital’s carbon removal lead, told me. “You want it to be as likely as possible that the thing you’re buying today is going to count in a compliance regime.”
That’s where the carbon credit certification platform Isometric comes into play. Founded in 2022, the startup raised $25 million in its seed round last year, co-led by Lowercarbon and Plural, a European venture capital firm. It has created a rigorous, scientifically-driven standard for carbon removal credits, with the intention of becoming the benchmark that buyers, sellers, and other stakeholders can coalesce around. So whenever federal standards or compliance regimes do kick in, there will be no doubt whether Isometric-verified credits are up to snuff.
“Isometric was basically founded to say, look, the long-term solution here is obviously government and regulation, but in the meantime, this is too important to let the market just keep doing it like this,” Lukas May, chief commercial officer at Isometric, told me. He believes that the government’s role in the carbon market should mirror the financial sector, but instead of preventing insider trading or predatory lending, federal regulators would make high-level determinations on things like what types of credits count and how long carbon must be locked away to count as “permanent removal.” Platforms like Isometric (often referred to as registries) could then focus on setting more granular, scientifically specific requirements for particular methods of carbon removal.
The startup aims to separate itself from existing registries, which include Puro.earth, Verra, and the Gold Standard, in two big ways.
First is just a focus on science. May said that 15 of Isometric’s first 25 hires were scientists. Today, the company’s chief scientist is Jennifer Wilcox, who recently left her position on the leadership team at the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, housed within the U.S. Department of Energy. Other registries, he told me, are “filled with NGO types” and “policy people” who lack the technical background to, say, evaluate what types rock formations are best for the geological sequestration of bio-oil or how CO2 fluxes in the soil impact enhanced rock weathering. These types of in-the-weeds analyses are integral to establishing stringent protocols to validate the amount of carbon that’s actually been removed.
Additionally, May, Orbuch, and Khaled Helioui, a partner at Plural who led the firm’s investment in Isometric, all said the company fixes a key flaw in the voluntary carbon market —- alignment of financial incentives. Traditionally, carbon removal suppliers pay registries to certify their credits, which creates an incentive for registries to overlook lax standards. But Isometric is instead paid a flat fee by the buyers for performing verification work on a per-ton basis.
This year, Isometric verified its first credits ever, from the carbon removal companies Vaulted Deep, which collects sludgy, organic waste and deposits it underground, and Charm Industrial, which injects processed biomass into abandoned oil and gas wells. Credits from these two suppliers were sold to Frontier, the carbon-removal initiative led by the payments firm Stripe. Just last week, Frontier identified Isometric as its first and only leading credit issuer.
“What makes Isometric stand out is they’re explicitly focused on durable CDR [carbon dioxide removal],” Joanna Klitzke, Frontier’s procurement and ecosystem strategy lead, told me. “Durable” refers to the fact that Isometric’s projects must sequester CO2 for 1,000 years or more. “They’re building tech products that make data and reporting particularly easy for suppliers and for credit management,” she added.
Everyone is essentially trying to avoid another scandal like the one that engulfed rainforest carbon offsets, which were found to be largely worthless. The industry has thus been shifting away from more nebulous carbon offsets, which seek to avoid future emissions by preventing deforestation or funding renewables development, and towards more concrete, but often more expensive, forms of carbon removal — think direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, or biomass carbon removal and storage, all of which have seen a boom in investment.
“As carbon removal was emerging as a new and potentially very exciting way to do this stuff, potentially more measurable and more rigorous, we couldn’t just sit and watch the same registries do the same thing,” May told me, saying doing so would “destroy trust in the carbon removal industry before it’s even off the ground.”
In a past life, Isometric’s founder and CEO, Eamon Jubbawy, founded a digital identity verification company for the financial services industry. This gave investors confidence that he could bring his expertise in trust-building and verification services to the carbon removal space.
“It’s not a like for like, but there’s a lot of overlap in terms of actually introducing efficiency, effectiveness, and having technology really open a market,” Plural’s Helioui told me. “This is not an endeavor or an opportunity where I would have been necessarily that keen to back a first-time founder, just because of the complexity of what you need to manage,” he said. “We’re really talking about market creation.”
But May doesn’t expect Isometric to totally dominate other registries. Just like there are many private banks, May envisions an “ecosystem of high quality registries,” eventually unified around a set of federal guardrails. Until then, he believes Isometric’s role is to “set a bar that is so high that the expectation and norm in the market shifts,” thus avoiding a race to the bottom where companies are able to greenwash their image with cheap, low-quality credits.
Now, not every company can afford the highest quality credits. And because of Isometric’s 1,000-year storage requirement, many cheaper, nature-based projects, such as reforestation, are excluded from its registry, even though there’s still demand for them. Orbuch told me that Isometric will continue adding guidelines for different carbon removal pathways, as it recently did for biochar, a charcoal-like brick that locks up carbon contained within biomass.
It’s still early days, and there’s plenty of room for Isometric to grow alongside the market. After all, it’s only issued 5,350 carbon removal credits to date, while nearly two billion credits have been issued in the voluntary carbon market overall.
“The whole industry needs to be scaling up,” May told me. “So we need to, in 10 years time, be, you know, issuing and verifying hundreds of millions, if not billions, of credits annually.”
On the U.S. Postal Service’s wonderfully weird shift to electric cars
When you think of a gas-guzzler, what comes to mind is probably a gigantic pickup like the Ram 1500 TRX, which gets a combined 12 miles per gallon, or a sports car like the Ferrari Daytona, which manages a less-than-impressive 13 mpg. But you may not think about a vehicle you’ve likely seen a thousand times: the small trucks driven by most local mail carriers, known as the Grumman Long Life Vehicle. They lived up to their name, since they’ve been in service since the mid-80s; the newest of them were built 30 years ago. But they get an abysmal 9 miles per gallon, burning fuel by the tankful and spewing emissions as they go about their appointed rounds.
So after a long and winding journey to a replacement for the LLV, the first of the Postal Service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric — just hit the road. And they are beautiful.
Oshkosh Defense
This may not be a widely shared opinion. Indeed, some will find the NGDV downright ugly, and they won’t exactly be wrong. But the new postal truck’s weird appearance — many have remarked that it looks like a duck, or something from a Richard Scarry book — is what, I predict, will make it iconic. In addition to bringing a touch of whimsy to your neighborhood, the NGDV will advance the cause of vehicle electrification much more than you might expect.
Postal delivery vehicles were always a no-brainer for electrification: They do a lot of stopping and starting, they follow fixed routes so they can charge at a single location, and since the existing fleet uses so much gas, electrifying them will make a real dent in the nation’s emissions.
The old trucks didn’t just add to our nation’s carbon emissions, they got no love from the workers who drove them. If you’ve noticed your mail carrier sweating profusely as they bring letters to your door in the summer, it’s not just because they have to carry that heavy bag up and down the street. It’s also because their creaky, uncomfortable vehicles have no air conditioning. In 2024.
“It felt like heaven blowing in my face,” said one carrier after trying out the NGDV, which does indeed have air conditioning, along with many of the safety features, including backup cameras, antilock brakes, and airbags, that are common in modern cars but the LLVs lacked. The new truck also looks unusual because it solves many of the problems the old vehicles pose for letter carriers. The truck had to be tall enough to allow them to stand up in the back, so they won’t have to hunch over the way they do now. It had to be low to the ground so they can get in and out easily dozens of times in a shift. It had to have a big enough windshield for the shortest and tallest carriers to see out comfortably.
Oshkosh Defense
All that meant that the NGDV wound up looking like no other vehicle. Once they are fully deployed — the current plan is to put 60,000 into service over the next few years — their unique profile will become familiar to everyone. And it’s important that this strange electric vehicle will be associated with the Postal Service. Because people love the Postal Service.
That might be a surprise given familiar complaints about lines at the post office. But it turns out that when surveys are taken, the Postal Service always ranks at or near the top of public approval among federal agencies. A recent Pew Research poll put the USPS’s approval at 72%, behind only the National Park Service. Gallup polls show them at the top. A 2020 survey by the department’s Inspector General found 91% of respondents saying they had a positive view of the USPS.
Perhaps people have a sense that what the Postal Service accomplishes is nothing short of miraculous. They move over 300 million pieces of mail every day, and deliver to 167 million addresses. They’ll pick up a letter at your door, take it anywhere in the country by land or air or water, and deliver it right to your Aunt Myrtle in the space of a few days — and not for $50 or $100, but for 73 cents. It costs the same whether that letter is going to Atlanta or Alakanuk. As U.S. law states, the purpose of the Postal Service is “to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people.” The USPS is nothing less than a national treasure.
Maybe people appreciate that, or maybe it’s just that most of us like getting mail, and our mail carriers are part of our communities (and usually friendly). In any case, the new electric vehicles will be associated with all the positive feelings people have about the USPS.
Which is why it’s fine — and maybe even better — that the NGDV is odd-looking, or even ugly (but in a charming way). One prevailing theory about EV adoption — advanced by Tesla’s Elon Musk and embodied in other vehicles like the Ford F-150 Lightning — is that the way to get people to buy EVs is to make EVs that are cool. It’s a valid perspective, but another way to think about the long-term goal of transportation electrification is that EVs ought to be in as many places and as many forms as possible. If you want to normalize them, what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?
It may be a while before you spot an NGDV in your neighborhood; among other things, it will take time to install the charging infrastructure at all the postal facilities necessary to electrify the entire delivery fleet. After all, one of the things that makes the Postal Service such a vital part of our national life is that it touches Americans, and delivers to them, no matter how far-flung they are. At least at first, we may be more likely to see electric delivery vehicles in big cities than in remote rural areas.
But before long, the NGDV could become the most widely recognized EV in the country, and one that people associate with service, community, efficiency, and patriotism. And yes, they look weird. Which is part of what makes them great.