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We read the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook so you don’t have to.
When former President Donald Trump exited the Oval Office in January 2021, he left behind a record of environmental rollbacks unrivaled in modern U.S. history. Over his 1,461 days as commander-in-chief, Trump replaced, eliminated, or otherwise dismantled more than 100 environmental rules — at least — from repealing the Clean Air Act to allowing coal plants to dump toxic wastewater into lakes and rivers to declaring open season on endangered gray wolves.
President Joe Biden then rolled back most of the rollbacks, largely before their full impacts could be felt, which is why some experts say the most significant climate consequence of Trump’s presidency was actually the loss of four years that could have moved the green transition forward.
Had all Trump’s policies gone into effect, the nonpartisan Rhodium Group estimated at the end of 2020, they would have added an additional 1.8 gigatons of CO2-equivalent to the atmosphere by 2035 — more than the annual energy emissions of Germany, Britain, and Canada combined. But even though we never felt the full brunt of them, the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the policies undertaken during his presidency were responsible for 22,000 deaths in 2019 alone due to sharp increases in things like asthma, heart disease, and lung cancer.
Now Trump is once again the presumed Republican nominee and currently leads Biden in general election polls. Were he to win, he has a ready roadmap for building on his dubious environmental legacy: Project 2025, a 920-page document developed by the right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.
Project 2025 isn’t just a climate plan, or course — it’s a comprehensive proposal, covering everything from immigration to abortion, education, pornography, and child labor. Though billed as a “presidential transition project,” its wishlist includes numerous actions that would require Republican control of both chambers of Congress (admittedly possible, though currently looking like a longshot) to enact. Undaunted, the document sets its sights on the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark climate legislation, which — since the U.S. is the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter — is all but necessary to keep the planet off the path to 1.5 degrees Celcius.
Here is how, precisely, Project 2025 aims to gut the IRA, shrink environmental protections, and slow forward momentum on climate change.
“‘Cheap grace’ aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue … They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.”
Republicans have cannily turned “climate” into another culture war buzzword. As with Critical Race Theory before it, this rhetoric strategy divorces the climate movement from what it actually is — a disparate and diverse constellation of ideas for how to move forward in the face of the reality of human-driven global warming — and flattens it into a boogeyman that voters can easily dismiss. Rather than allow for honest debate over the upsides and drawbacks of LNG or of preserving ecosystems versus quickly building out renewables, the effect is to shut down any and all conversation before it can even start.
Project 2025 both outlines and embodies this strategy. In the foreword, Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts bafflingly characterizes climate as a “pseudo-religion”; elsewhere in the document, “climate extremism” is often lumped alongside “abortion, gender radicalism … and other woke ideas.”
For good measure, the Project 2025 playbook also uses religious metaphors to code any concern about the environment as being morally wrong or even evil. Republicans have already picked up on this cue: “We should not be bending the knee to this new religion … We are flogging ourselves and losing our modern way of life bowing to this new god of climate,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis argued during a Republican presidential debate last year.
“The National Labs have been too focused on climate change and renewable technologies. American science dominance is critical to U.S. national security and economic strength.”
As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration channeled $1.5 billion to the Department of Energy’s national laboratories for “innovative research in clean technologies” and “advancing U.S. energy security.” This has been essential for “de-risking” the otherwise prohibitively expensive technological advancements necessary for reaching net zero.
Project 2025, naturally, wants none of that: “The three National Labs run by DOE’s [National Nuclear Security Administration] should continue to focus on national security issues,” Bernard McNamee, the former commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Trump, writes in the document’s chapter on revamping the department. Additionally, the “ill-advised attempt to expand the National Science Foundation’s mission from supporting university research to supporting an all-encompassing technology transition” (a mischaracterization) should be reconsidered, and “there should be a review to measure, prioritize, and consolidate DOE programs based on a range of beneficial factors, including degree of relationship to national security.” (While addressing the nation’s climate goals is an NSF priority, it is not done at the expense of supporting university research. Also, the current director of the NSF is a Trump appointee).
The Trump administration was memorably hostile toward science, and there are no signs he’ll change his heart during a second term; he’s already vowed to revive “Schedule F,” which reclassifies many government researchers and scientists as at-will employees, making them easier to “clean out” if they “frustrate his policies.”
Still, it does appear that the Heritage Foundation sees some usefulness for scientists: “The next administration should fund the design, development, and deployment of new nuclear warheads, including the production of plutonium pits in quantity,” Project 2025 says.
“The next conservative Administration should rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs (specifically USAID’s Climate Strategy 2022–2030 ); shut down the agency’s offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement; and narrowly limit funding to traditional climate mitigation efforts.”
The United States is the single greatest historical contributor to climate change, but Project 2025 has little sympathy for nations that might be suffering as a result. “The [Biden] administration has incorporated its radical climate policy into every USAID initiative,” Max Primorac, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, complains in the document. “It has joined or funded international partnerships dedicated to advancing the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement and has supported the idea of giving trillions of dollars more in aid transfers for ‘climate reparations.’”
Notably, Biden has not promised climate reparations — despite Trump and other Republicans’ frequent claims to the contrary. And while climate change is “a top driver of humanitarian need and human suffering, particularly for the poorest countries,” according to the United Nations, the former president slashed $200 million from environmental initiatives in his 2019 budget, including investments to help nations move away from heavy carbon-emitting industries.
“Taxpayer dollars should not be used to subsidize preferred businesses and energy resources, thereby distorting the market and undermining energy reliability.”
Among the programs and offices Project 2025 wants to eliminate (or at least substantially reduce) funding for are: the Climate Hub Office; the Clean Energy Corps, the Office of Domestic Climate Policy; the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy; the Grid Deployment Office; the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon; the Conservation Reserve Program; the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations; the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights; “the activities of EPA advisory bodies”; the Office of State and Community Energy Programs; ARPA-E; the DOE Loan Program Office; the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management; “grant programs for things like energy storage and the testing of grid-enhancing technologies”; “carbon capture utilization and storage programs”; the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program; the Bureau of Energy Resources; the Office of Emergency Management; the National Flood Insurance Program; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (more on that below).
“Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which established new programs and are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special interests, and support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs.”
Project 2025 opposes green subsidies across the board. It’s especially twitchy about programs aimed at helping “the private sector deploy and market clean energy and decarbonizing resources” — because, supposedly, the “government should not be picking winners and losers.”
Still, while it’s uncertain how much damage a Republican president could do to the Inflation Reduction Act without the help of a conservative-controlled Congress, Project 2025 makes clear there are lots of places conservatives can chip away, including going after “subsidies of electric vehicles,” “subsidies for transit expansion,” and subsidies renewables like wind and solar. Additionally, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy “is a conduit for taxpayer dollars to fund progressive policies, including decarbonizing the economy and renewable resources.” That won’t do: “Eliminate EERE,” it says, or otherwise defund it.
“While individual investors may prefer to invest in ‘green’ companies, ‘woke’ companies, or companies with greater board diversity, and may even be willing to sacrifice some financial gains to do so, the question relevant to [the Department of Labor] is whether, and under what conditions, fiduciaries should be permitted to follow this path as well.”
If we’re being honest, though, isn’t the whole “ESG is evil” thing kind of last year?
“The new Administration’s review will permit a fresh look at past monument decrees and new ones by President Biden. Furthermore, the new Administration must vigorously defend the downward adjustments it makes to permit a ruling on a President’s authority to reduce the size of national monuments by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
President Trump was responsible for the most significant reduction in protected land in U.S. history. When he took office, Biden reinstated the protections — mainly in Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Project 2025 prioritizes rolling back the rollback of the rollback, but making it stick by taking the case to the conservative-controlled Supreme Court.
The former acting Bureau of Land Management director under Trump, William Perry Pendley, writes in the section on reforming the Department of the Interior that Biden is “abusing National Environmental Policy Act processes, the Antiquities Act, and bureaucratic procedures to advance a radical climate agenda,” and directs an incoming Republican president to “seek repeal of the Antiquities Act.” Republicans and Democrats alike have used the Antiquities Act over the decades to protect scenic and culturally significant places, including the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Olympic National Parks. Any Supreme Court ruling could effectively curb the ability of future presidents to protect scenic and culturally important parts of the country.
“NOAA consists of six main offices ... Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Thomas F. Gilman, writing on reforms for the Department of Commerce, gets right to the point: “Break up NOAA.” The agency’s “emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable,” he claims, adding, that “its current organization corrupts its useful functions.”
In practice, that would mean the National Weather Service should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” since “Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by … private companies such as AccuWeather,” Gilman writes. It’s a notable shoutout: Barry Lee Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather, was briefly a Trump nominee to, uh, run NOAA.
Gilman has ideas for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, too, writing that it “provides theoretical science” and is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism,” and should therefore be “disbanded.” Data from the National Hurricane Center is further ordered to be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”
Echoing the Trump administration’s hostility toward the sciences, he goes on to allege that “scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism … if political appointees are not wholly in sync with administration policy” — never mind that disagreement is one of the most essential parts of scientific research and progress.
But don’t worry: Project 2025 also calls for an elevation of … “the Office of Space Commerce.” Phew.
Republicans are going to make dishwasher cycle times a culture war or die trying.
Project 2025 dictates that “Congress should reform the Natural Gas Act” to “eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas exports.” Currently, the DOE must decide if it is in the “public interest” to allow LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries — the only part of the permitting process that could even potentially consider the export terminal’s impacts on frontline communities or their effect on climate change more largely
How? By narrowing the Natural Gas Act to only consider “whether there is a need for the natural gas” and the “impacts of the actual pipeline itself, not indirect upstream and downstream effects.”
The next Republican president should “immediately” reopen the Arctic to drilling, expand the controversial Willow drilling project, max out offshore oil and natural gas lease sales, and restart coal leasing in Wyoming and Montana, the authors write.
Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former Environmental Protection Agency chief of staff, details almost gleefully how the agency’s regulatory powers will be dismantled, from preventing downwind states from “over-controlling” their upwind neighbors to loosening car emission standards and beyond.
Since 1968, California has been allowed to set stricter vehicle emission limits than the federal government thanks to a Clean Air Act waiver; other states are welcome but not required to opt in. As president, Trump revoked California’s right to include greenhouse gases in its emissions considerations and barred other states from adopting its criteria. That seems like it’s back on the table — and could be headed to a consequential decision in the Supreme Court.
Project 2025 proposes a fleet-wide average of 35 miles per gallon, far below current benchmarks of 49 miles per gallon by 2026 and 58 miles per gallon by 2032.
There is no question that the management of wild horses and burros is a big problem for the Western United States. But Project 2025 waves off strategies like “expanded adoptions” and “more effective use of fertility controls” as “not enough,” writing that “Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.”
Project 2025 aims not only to gut the Endangered Species Act, but also to “direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to end its abuse of Section 10( j) of the ESA,” which is being used to reintroduce grizzly bears in Washington state and wolves in Colorado.
Project 2025 says that “the Department of Energy should end the Biden Administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels, restore America’s energy independence, oppose eyesore windmills built at taxpayer expense, and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing, rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and eventually out of the driver’s seat altogether in favor of self-driving robots.” But as far as roadmaps go, that doesn’t look much like a way forward — it looks like holding back the inevitable. If that’s the case, then self-driving robots start to look good.
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Instead of rocket fuel, they’re burning biomass.
Arbor Energy might have the flashiest origin story in cleantech.
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
Take that, all you founders humble-bragging about starting in a dingy garage.
“It’s not new science, per se,” Hartwig told me. The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions. Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
“Arbor is the first to bring forward a technology that can provide clean baseload energy in a very compact form,” Clea Kolster, a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital told me. Lowercarbon is an investor in Arbor, alongside other climate tech-focused venture capital firms including Gigascale Capital and Voyager Ventures, but the company has not yet disclosed how much it’s raised.
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires. Hartwig told me that for every ton of organic waste, Arbor can produce about one megawatt hour of electricity, which is in line with current efficiency standards, plus about 1.8 tons of carbon removal. “We look at being as efficient, if not a little more efficient than a traditional bioenergy power plant that does not have carbon capture on it,” he explained.
The company’s carbon removal price targets are also extremely competitive — in the $50 to $100 per ton range, Hartwig said. Compare that to something like direct air capture, which today exceeds $600 per ton, or enhanced rock weathering, which is usually upwards of $300 per ton. “The power and carbon removal they can offer comes at prices that meet nearly unlimited demand,”Mike Schroepfer, the founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, told me via email. Arbor benefits from the fact that the electricity it produces and sells can help offset the cost of the carbon removal, and vice versa. So if the company succeeds in hitting its cost and efficiency targets, Hartwig said, this “quickly becomes a case for, why wouldn’t you just deploy these everywhere?”
Initial customers will likely be (no surprise here) the Microsofts, Googles and Metas of the world — hyperscalers with growing data center needs and ambitious emissions targets. “What Arbor unlocks is basically the ability for hyperscalers to stop needing to sacrifice their net zero goals for AI,” Kolster told me. And instead of languishing in the interminable grid interconnection queue, Hartwig said that providing power directly to customers could ensure rapid, early deployment. “We see it as being quicker to power behind-the-meter applications, because you don’t have to go through the process of connecting to the grid,” he told me. Long-term though, he said grid connection will be vital, since Arbor can provide baseload power whereas intermittent renewables cannot.
All of this could serve as a much cheaper alternative, to say, re-opening shuttered nuclear facilities, as Microsoft also recently committed to doing at Three Mile Island. “It’s great, we should be doing that,” Kolster said of this nuclear deal, “but there’s actually a limited pool of options to do that, and unfortunately, there is still community pushback.”
Currently, Arbor is working to build out its pilot plant in San Bernardino, California, which Hartwig told me will turn on this December. And by 2030, the company plans to have its first commercial plant operating at scale, generating 100 megawatts of electricity while removing nearly 2 megatons of CO2 every year. “To put it in perspective: In 2023, the U.S. added roughly 9 gigawatts of gas power to the grid, which generates 18 to 23 megatons of CO2 a year,” Schroepfer wrote to me. So having just one Arbor facility removing 2 megatons would make a real dent. The first plant will be located in Louisiana, where Arbor will also be working with an as-yet-unnamed partner to do the carbon storage.
The company’s carbon credits will be verified with the credit certification platform Isometric, which is also backed by Lowercarbon and thought to have the most stringent standards in the industry. Hartwig told me that Arbor worked hand-in-hand with Isometric to develop the protocol for “biogenic carbon capture and storage,” as the company is the first Isometric-approved supplier to use this standard.
But Hartwig also said that government support hasn’t yet caught up to the tech’s potential. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct air capture companies with $180 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, technology such as Arbor’s only qualifies for $85 per ton. It’s not nothing — more than the zero dollars enhanced rock weathering companies such as Lithos or bio-oil sequestration companies such as Charm are getting. “But at the same time, we’re treated the same as if we’re sequestering CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant or a coal plant,” Hartwig told me, as opposed to getting paid for actual CO2 removal.
“I think we are definitely going to need government procurement or involvement to actually hit one, five, 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal,” Hartwig said. Globally, scientists estimate that we’ll need up to 10 gigatons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Even at $100 per ton, 10 gigatons of carbon removal is still a pretty hefty price tag,” Hartwig told me. A $1 trillion price tag, to be exact. “We definitely need more players than just Microsoft.”
New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.