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:
A peek inside the playbooks of four climate advocacy orgs.
A new Trump administration’s climate agenda will be much the same as the old one.
Project 2025, the 920-page instruction manual for an incoming Republican administration from the conservative Heritage Foundation, calls for eliminating the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, its Loan Programs Office, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) — and so did its 2017 equivalent. Every Trump budget included cuts to these programs. The Trump administration rewrote emissions standards, attempted to prevent states from enforcing more stringent guidance, and reduced the social cost of carbon. Project 2025 outlines most of these same changes and more.
Environmental and climate-focused groups played a key role in fighting those climate policies last time around. Along with state attorneys general, these groups filed lawsuits against regulatory changes and worked with business groups to build support for federal action on climate. The game plan, say people working for some of those same climate advocacy groups today, would be much the same for round two.
At the same time, though, the political questions have grown more complex, even for programs once considered ideologically neutral. If Republicans control one or both houses of Congress, in addition to the White House, how will climate advocates convince Republican lawmakers even to preserve existing law, let alone continue advancing a decarbonization agenda?
After talking with four different climate-focused groups — the Sierra Club, Evergreen Action, Third Way, and the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation, each of which has a different approach to clean energy advocacy — I was left with four takeaways for how they’ll attempt to handle a second Trump administration.
No organization I contacted provided a specific plan for a second Trump administration. But Sierra Club, Evergreen, and Third Way all said they’re working on dual tracks, charting a course to continue supporting the Biden administration’s climate policy both now, as the administration scrambles to finalize regulations, and under a potential second term from either Biden or Trump.
“There’s certainly planning going on amongst enviros, as there always is around these times, of what the next four years could look like,” both for a Biden and for a Trump presidency, Patrick Drupp, Sierra Club's director of climate policy, told me. “We should be prepared that every single thing we liked and praised in [the Biden] administration would come under fire” in the event of a Trump victory, he added.
A second Trump administration would, for instance, almost certainly attempt to scale back new rules on soot pollution, mercury and air toxics standards at power plants, and the recently tightened limits on tailpipe emissions, Drupp said — effectively “anything at EPA.”
Drupp’s team is working to game out what policies and rollbacks might come first. If and when they happen, the Sierra Club will swing into action to explain “what it means when you roll back these regulations,” he said. “They have important real-life consequences for folks.” Sierra Cub also has a whole legal team separate from Drupp’s policy shop, and he said his colleagues would very likely sue to block efforts like these, as well.
Evergreen will make its case against Trump — i.e. “explain why bad ideas are bad,” as Craig Segall, vice president at Evergreen Action, a climate policy and advocacy offshoot of Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign, put it to me.
“This is an election that matters on geologic timescales,” Segall said. “It’s our job to put forward that case — and also to talk about how the Biden administration and the states can and should do better in a second term.” Segall pointed to Michigan’s new clean energy standard as an example of aggressive state policy that would be difficult for a Trump administration to undermine. And he highlighted Georgia as a state less ideologically interested in climate change but still benefiting from clean power investment.
Then there’s the Inflation Reduction Act. Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Energy lists repealing IRA as its first specific policy goal. While the IRA has helped drive the largest buildout of clean energy in American history, as of 2023, most Americans hadn’t heard of it, according to a Heatmap poll.
Without the IRA, growth in renewables would continue, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Third Way’s senior director of domestic policy for climate and energy, told me. But it wouldn’t continue at the same pace, putting the U.S. behind on emissions reductions targets and limiting its ability to keep up in a global competition to manufacture clean energy technology.
The IRA’s success — and survival — could depend on the extent to which Republican lawmakers are willing to quietly embrace it, as Emily Pontecorvo pointed out last summer. With significant investments flowing to the Republican-led Battery Belt states, one line of argument would posit that red state politicians have incentives to protect economic activity in their district.
Members of Congress might be enthusiastic about budget cuts in the abstract, but when those budget cuts come to their districts, those members lose interest, argued David Ellis, a senior vice president of policy and outreach at the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation. Given how much the uptake of IRA’s tax credits has outpaced initial projections, Ellis described it as among the most immediately impactful pieces of legislation passed in recent memory. That will make it “very hard to undo,” he said.
There are reasons to think that line of reasoning might not hold up — a University of Texas at Austin study showed that Texas state senators with renewable energy investment in their districts were no more likely to support pro-renewables policy than senators without. Republicans will likely try to overturn the IRA regardless of the political implications, Drupp said. “How long did it take before Republicans stopped trying to overturn Obamacare?” he said. “I think it's similar.”
It took until 2017, seven years after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, for that legislation to achieve majority approval in tracking polls. That uptick in sentiment came as Congress very nearly repealed the law, before a handful of Republican senators famously squashed those efforts.
But the ACA wasn’t just popular because Republicans were trying to repeal it. Its approval ratings also came from the fact that Americans were feeling the impact of the law, Sarah Kliff and Dylan Scott argued for Vox in 2017.
The analogy between the IRA and the ACA is imperfect, Fitzpatrick said. Still, it underscores the basic political principle at play. If more Americans can understand the benefits the IRA offers them, they’ll be more hesitant to overturn it.
“For that comparison to hold, the average American person, family, business owner has to be able to see a real impact on the things they care most about,” Fitzpatrick said. If Americans can understand the pocketbook and energy reliability impacts of the IRA in addition to its impact on climate, that could put it off-limits.
Third Way is trying to emphasize to Democrats that they, in turn, need to emphasize the benefits of the IRA when they talk to voters. “We also need to make sure that advocates, people who are influential in communities across the country, understand not just that this isn't just a lefty priority,” Fiztpatrick said, noting Third Way’s work with educational organizations aimed at grassroots audiences. “This isn't just about climate change. There are benefits that are reaching them in their communities.”
Along with labor groups, business will also prove to be another key constituency in any fight over the IRA, Segall told me. IRA repeal is “clearly a high priority” for some conservative lawmakers — but “there are now billion-dollar industries that are correctly reckoning they have to decarbonize to stay competitive,” he said. Nissan and General Motors, for instance, told the Financial Times that the end of the IRA might spell trouble for their American electric vehicle businesses.
The president cannot unilaterally eliminate either a department or a Congressionally authorized office within a department. But Congress can.
Republicans controlled at least one house of Congress for all four years of the Trump administration, and yet proposed cuts to EERE, ARPA-E, and other climate-focused offices in the Department of Energy never came to fruition. In 2017, six Senate Republicans — including Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Sen. Lamar Alexander, then chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for DOE — wrote a letter to express their support for the programs.
“Energy investment across the board came out of the first Trump administration, if not unscathed, certainly less damaged than other parts of the government,” Ellis said.
Next time around, Project 2025 calls for eliminating the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, its Office of State and Community Energy Programs, ARPA-E, the Office of Grid Deployment, and its loan program, and EERE. But just because things didn’t go according to plan last time doesn’t mean those programs are safe.
Ellis told me that Congressional Republicans are now much more beholden to the Trump platform than they were in 2017. “The early signs are not good that a Republican Congress would do anything to restrain Donald Trump, given the fact that they're falling in lockstep behind him,” he said. That leaves the offices that have served as incubators and provided funding for nascent clean energy technologies and projects more vulnerable than before.
Sen. Alexander retired in 2021. The new ranking Republican on the subcommittee that handles DOE appropriations is Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, who has criticized the Biden administration’s energy policy but has not called loudly for cuts.
Fitzpatrick said he’s hopeful that a bipartisan group of lawmakers will step in to prevent anything drastic — but he noted that could be more challenging given what he described as the “ideological bent” Trump has projected onto research and development funding for energy, which had previously enjoyed consistent bipartisan support. One example: The Energy Act of 2020, which Ellis described as a “smorgasboard of bipartisan energy innovation efforts,” which passed under Trump.
Third Way, he noted, will look to educate a wide range of policymakers — key appropriators included — on the benefits of various DOE programs.
Even if Congress holds budgets relatively stable, a Trump DOE will have bureaucratic levers to pull to slow the work, both Fitzpatrick and Drupp said. That could mean allowing workforce attrition, sitting on reports, gumming up the process of offshore wind approvals, rubber-stamping new fossil fuel infrastructure, failing to conduct research directed by appropriations, or slowing the pace of loans.
A Trump administration could also wipe out hallmark Biden policies by executive order, such as the Justice40 initiative to bring 40% of the benefits of federal climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities, Ellis added. (Project 2025 does not call for its elimination, but calls it an “innocuous”-sounding program that runs the risk of politicizing energy.)
Project 2025 lays out a long list of changes for the Environmental Protection Agency: Pausing any research contract worth over $100,000, closing the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, preventing California from enforcing emissions restrictions on greenhouse gasses, and making it easier for the agency to approve pesticides.
Many more regulations — surrounding ozone and particulate pollution, mercury and air toxin pollution, heavy duty truck emission standards — could be rolled back or changed, said Drupp.
“It becomes hard when everything you love and care about is under attack,” he told me. “How do you prioritize that?” Collaboration will prove critical, Drupp noted — different organizations will attempt to figure out how best to allocate their resources.
During the first Trump administration, the “big greens,” community groups, and dozens of states filed lawsuits that helped stifle regulatory changes, Segall pointed out. The length of the regulatory process will extend the time horizon of any possible regulatory change. Although the Trump administration announced its intent to repeal the Clean Power Plan in 2017, it failed to unveil a new plan before 2019. That plan, in turn, remained tied up in court until one day before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
What if, instead of maintaining old pipelines, gas utilities paid for homes to electrify?
California just hit a critical climate milestone: On September 1, Pacific Gas and Electric, the biggest utility in the state, raised natural gas rates by close to $6 due to shrinking gas demand.
I didn’t say it was a milestone worth celebrating. But experts have long warned that gas rates would go up as customers started to use less of the fossil fuel. PG&E is now forecasting enough of a drop in demand, whether because homeowners are making efficiency improvements or switching to electric appliances, that it needs to charge everyone a bit more to keep up with the cost of maintaining its pipelines.
Shortly after the rate increase went into effect, however, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill aimed at addressing this exact problem. The new law gives PG&E and other utilities permission to use money they would have spent to replace aging, leaky pipelines to pay for the electrification of the homes served by those pipes — as long as electrifying the homes is cheaper. Instead of investing millions of ratepayer dollars into the gas system, utilities can start to decommission parts of it, shrinking gas use and fixed costs in tandem.
PG&E actually already has the freedom to do this, and has even completed a fair number of projects. But the utility has had limited success, mainly because of an anti-discrimination law that gives building owners the right to stick with natural gas. It only takes one gas stalwart to thwart a whole neighborhood’s prospects for free electric appliances, since in order to keep delivering gas to that one household, the utility has to invest in the entire section of pipeline serving the area. A 2023 report showed that while PG&E had completed more than 100 projects, it hadn’t been able to convince clusters of customers larger than five at a time to convert.
The new law doesn’t fundamentally change the anti-discrimination rule, known as a utility’s “duty to serve,” but it does relieve PG&E and others of this duty if at least two-thirds of the homeowners served by a given section of pipeline consent to getting off gas. For now, the legislation limits utilities to executing 30 such projects. But for those 30, as long as two-thirds consent, the utility can now tell the holdouts that it is retiring the pipeline, and that they have no choice but to get on the electric bandwagon.
“If a supermajority wants it, it can move forward,” Matt Vespa, a senior attorney from Earthjustice who worked on the legislation, told me. “Which I think is probably a good place to start from. You want to have a place where there’s significant buy-in.”
This strategy, sometimes called “zonal decarbonization” or “targeted electrification,” is one that many climate groups are advocating for as a way to achieve an orderly and equitable transition off of natural gas. The approach most states have taken so far — providing subsidies that gently prod consumers into going electric — results in a random pattern of adoption that can benefit some homeowners while harming others. It also does nothing to deter gas utilities from investing hundreds of millions of dollars in maintaining, replacing, or building new pipelines each year — investments that are set up to be recouped from ratepayers over the course of decades.
California isn’t the first place in the world to experiment with targeted electrification. The Swiss city of Zurich began systematically shutting down sections of its gas system in 2021, giving affected users about a decade of warning and offering partial compensation for the cost of new equipment. In Massachusetts, the utility Eversource is piloting a unique neighborhood-scale electrification project. The company hooked up 32 residential buildings and a few commercial businesses in the city of Framingham to a new underground network of pipes that carry water rather than natural gas, which in turn connect to geothermal heat pumps that use the water to heat or cool the air inside. There are more than a dozen such “thermal energy network” pilot projects in various stages in Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, Washington, Vermont, Maryland, and Minnesota.
But the new California program is unique in its scale and approach. For one thing, it applies to all gas utilities in the state. Beginning next summer, they will each need to submit maps to the utility commission that identify potential pipeline replacement projects; then, in 2026, regulators will use those maps to designate priority areas, giving precedence to low-income communities and households that lack heating or cooling. By July of that year, the commission must establish the rules of the pilot program, including a methodology for utilities to determine when electrification is more cost-effective than pipeline replacement, and rules for how utilities can pay for the projects and recover costs.
PG&E supported the bill and worked closely with its authors on the language. The utility declined an interview, but emailed me a statement saying the legislation “enables cost-effective, targeted electrification projects which will help avoid more expensive gas pipeline replacements, reducing gas system operating costs, and support the state’s and PG&E’s decarbonization goals.”
Utilities will still be spending ratepayer money on the electrification projects, but far less than they would have spent on pipeline infrastructure. For the remaining gas customers, it’s still possible rates will go up, though by less than they would have otherwise. Mike Henchen, a principal in the carbon-free buildings program at RMI, told me these pilot projects alone are not going to pull so many customers away from the gas system that it will put upward pressure on rates. The law caps the program at no more than 1% of a utility’s customers.
Vespa, the Earthjustice attorney, told me he originally worked on a more ambitious version of the bill that would have required utilities to avoid any new investments in the gas system when electrification was a cheaper alternative. But it was pared back and made voluntary in order to get it through the legislature. “The hope is that we'll get projects off the ground, we’ll get proof-of-concept,” he said. “I think there was a need to demonstrate some successful stories and then hopefully expand from there.”
While these pilots make sense, economically, for a dual gas and electric company like PG&E, one big question is whether the state’s gas-only utilities like Southern California Gas will take the initiative. (SoCalGas did not respond to my inquiry prior to publication, but the company did support the legislation.)
Looking ahead, even if lawmakers do expand the program to authorize every cost-effective project, this model can’t transition the entire state away from gas. These projects are more likely to pencil out in places with lower housing density, where a given section of pipeline is serving only a handful of homes. A fact sheet about the bill published by its lead sponsor, state senator David Min, says that “zero emissions alternatives” to pipeline replacement are only technically feasible and cost effective for about 5% of PG&E’s territory. “Gas customers won't be able to pay for the decommissioning of the whole gas system, or even 50% of it,” said Henchen.
In the meantime, however, there’s lots of low-hanging fruit to pluck. Targeted electrification of just 3% to 4% of gas customers across the state could reduce gas utility spending by $15 billion to $26 billion through 2045, according to an analysis by Energy and Environmental Economics.
“It’s a modest step,” said Vespa of the new law. “But I do think it’s meaningful to start moving forward and developing the frameworks for this.”
Revoy is already hitching its power packs to semis in one of America’s busiest shipping corridors.
Battery swaps used to be the future. To solve the unsolvable problem of long recharging times for electric vehicles, some innovators at the dawn of this EV age imagined roadside stops where drivers would trade their depleted battery for a fully charged one in a matter of minutes, then be on their merry way.
That vision didn’t work out for passenger EVs — the industry chose DC fast charging instead. If the startup Revoy has its way, however, this kind of idea might be exactly the thing that helps the trucking industry surmount its huge hurdles to using electric power.
Revoy’s creation is, essentially, a bonus battery pack on wheels that turns an ordinary semi into an EV for as long as the battery lasts. The rolling module carries a 525 kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack attaches to the back of the truck; then, the trailer full of cargo attaches to the module. The pack offers a typical truck 250 miles of electric driving. Founder Ian Rust told me that’s just enough energy to reach the next Revoy station, where the trucker could swap their depleted module for a fresh one. And if the battery hits zero charge, that's no problem because the truck reverts to its diesel engine. It’s a little like a plug-in hybrid vehicle, if the PHEV towed its battery pack like an Airstream and could drop it off at will.
“If you run out of battery with us, there's basically no range anxiety,” Rust said. “And we do it intentionally on our routes, run it down to as close to zero as possible before we hit the next Revoy swapping station. That way you can get the maximum value of the battery without having to worry about range.”
To start, a trucker in a normal, everyday semi pulls up to a Revoy station and drops their trailer. A worker attaches a fully charged Revoy unit to the truck and trailer—all in five minutes or less, Revoy promises. Once in place, the unit interfaces seamlessly with the truck’s drivetrain and controls.
“It basically takes over as the cruise control on the vehicle,” he said. “So the driver gets it up to speed, takes their foot off the gas, and then we actually become the primary powertrain on the vehicle. You really only have to burn diesel for the little bit that is getting onto the highway and then getting off the highway, and you get really extreme MPGs with that.”
The Revoy model is going through its real-world paces as we speak. Rust’s startup has partnered with Ryder trucking, whose drivers are powering their semis with Revoy EVs at battery-swap stops along a stretch of Interstate 30 in Texas and Arkansas, a major highway for auto parts and other supplies coming from Mexico. Rust hopes the next Revoy corridor will go into Washington State, where the ample hydropower could help supply clean energy to all those swappable batteries. Happily, he said, Revoy can expand piecemeal like this because its approach negates the chicken-and-egg problem of needing a whole nation of EV chargers to make the vehicles themselves viable. Once a truck leaves a Revoy corridor, it’s just a diesel-powered truck again.
Early data from the Ryder pilot shows that the EV unit slashed how much diesel fuel a truck needs to make it down the designated corridor. “This is a way we can reduce a path to reduce the emissions of our fleet without having to buy anything — and without having to have to worry about how much utilization we're going to have to get,” Mike Plasencia, group director of New Product Strategy at Ryder, told me.
Trucking represents one of the biggest opportunities for cutting the carbon emissions of the transportation sector. It’s also one of the most challenging. Heatmap has covered the problem of oversized SUV and pickup truck EVs, which need larger, more expensive batteries to propel them. The trucking problem is that issue on steroids: A semi can tow up to 80,000 pounds down an American highway.
There are companies building true EV semi trucks despite this tall order — Tesla’s has been road-testing one while hauling Pepsi around, and trucking mainstays like Peterbilt are trying their hand as well. Although the EV model that works for everyday cars — a built-in battery that requires recharging after a couple hundred miles — can work for short-haul trucks that move freight around a city, it is a difficult fit for long-haul trucking where a driver must cover vast distances on a strict timetable. That’s exactly where Revoy is trying to break in.
"We are really focused on long haul,” he told me. “The reason for that is, it's the bigger market. One of the big misconceptions in trucking is that it's dominated by short haul. It's very much the opposite. And it's the bigger emission source, it's the bigger fuel user."
Rust has a background in robotics and devised the Revoy system as a potential solution to both the high cost of EV semis and to the huge chunks of time lost to fueling during long-distance driving. Another part of the pitch is that the Revoy unit is more than a battery. By employing the regenerative braking common in EVs, the Revoy provides a redundancy beyond air brakes for slowing a big semi—that way, if the air brakes fail, a trucker has a better option than the runaway truck lane. The setup also provides power and active steering to the Revoy’s axle, which Rust told me makes the big rig easier to maneuver.
Plasencia agrees. “The feedback from the drivers has been positive,” he said. “You get feedback messages like, it felt like I was driving a car, or like I wasn't carrying anything.”
As it tries to expand to more trucking corridors across the nation, Revoy may face an uphill battle in trying to sell truckers and trucking companies on an entirely new way to think about electrifying their fleets. But Rust has one ace up his sleeve: With Revoy, they get to keep their trucks — no need to buy new ones.
On the DOE’s transmission projects, Cybertruck recalls, and Antarctic greening
Current conditions: Hurricane Kirk, now a Category 4 storm, could bring life-threatening surf and rip currents to the East Coast this weekend • The New Zealand city of Dunedin is flooded after its rainiest day in more than 100 years • Parts of the U.S. may be able to see the Northern Lights this weekend after the sun released its biggest solar flare since 2017.
The Energy Department yesterday announced $1.5 billion in investments toward four grid transmission projects. The selected projects will “enable nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity throughout Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, while creating nearly 9,000 good-paying jobs,” the DOE said in a statement. One of the projects, called Southern Spirit, will involve installing a 320-mile high-voltage direct current line across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that connects Texas’ ERCOT grid to the larger U.S. grid for the first time. This “will enhance reliability and prevent outages during extreme weather events,” the DOE said. “This is a REALLY. BIG. DEAL,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek.
The DOE also released a study examining grid demands through 2050 and concluded that the U.S. will need to double or even triple transmission capacity by 2050 compared to 2020 to meet growing electricity demand.
Duke Energy, one of the country’s largest utilities, appears to be walking back its commitment to ditch coal by 2035. In a new plan released yesterday, Duke said it would not shut down the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the U.S., Gibson Station in Indiana, in 2035 as previously planned, but would instead run it through 2038. The company plans to retrofit the plant to run on natural gas as well as coal, with similar natural-gas conversions planned for other coal plants. The company also slashed projects for expanding renewables. According toBloomberg, a Duke spokeswoman cited increasing power demand for the changes. Electricity demand has seen a recent surge in part due to a boom in data centers. Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a consumer and environmental advocacy group, noted that Duke’s modeling has Indiana customers paying 4% more each year through 2030 “as Duke continues to cling to its coal plants and wastes hundreds of millions on gasifying coal.”
The Edison Electric Institute issued its latest electric vehicle forecast, anticipating EV trends through 2035. Some key projections from the trade group’s report:
Tesla issued another recall for the Cybertruck yesterday, the fifth recall for the electric pickup since its launch at the end of last year. The new recall has to do with the rearview camera, which apparently is too slow to display an image to the driver when shifting into reverse. It applies to about 27,000 trucks (which is pretty much all of them), but an over-the-air software update to fix the problem has already been released. There were no reports of injuries or accidents from the defect.
A new study published in Nature found that vegetation is expanding across Antarctica’s northernmost region, known as the Antarctic Peninsula. As the planet warms, plants like mosses and lichen are growing on rocks where snow and ice used to be, resulting in “greening.” Examining satellite data, the researchers from the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire, and the British Antarctic Survey, were shocked to discover that the peninsula has seen a tenfold increase in vegetation cover since 1986. And the rate of greening has accelerated by over 30% since 2016. This greening is “creating an area suitable for more advanced plant life or invasive species to get a foothold,” co-author Olly Bartlett, a University of Hertfordshire researcher, told Inside Climate News. “These rates of change we’re seeing made us think that perhaps we’ve captured the start of a more dramatic transformation.”
Moss on Ardley Island in the Antarctic. Dan Charman/Nature
Japan has a vast underground concrete tunnel system that was built to take on overflow from excess rain water and prevent Tokyo from flooding. It’s 50 meters underground, and nearly 4 miles long.
Carl Court/Getty Images