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:
On water stress, private jets, and the campaign’s home stretch.
Current conditions: More than 100 people are dead in the Philippines following flooding and landslides caused by Tropical Storm Trami • A low-pressure area in the southwest Caribbean could develop into Hurricane Patty as the storm season enters its final month • New York City’s rainless streak extends Monday as the Yankees-Dodgers World Series heads to the Bronx.
Former President Donald Trump spent the weekend blasting everything from hydrogen to electric vehicle charging to the Federal Emergency Management Agency while making his final pitch to voters ahead of Election Day. Speaking in a Detroit suburb on Saturday, Trump repeated his common refrain about hydrogen-powered cars, telling supporters, “There will be no hydrogen. They tend to blow up, and once they blow up, you are not recognizable anymore.” Appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast, Trump also alleged that California has “brownouts every weekend” due to the electricity demands of electric vehicles; misleadingly said he’d be able to “instantly” restart construction on a liquefied natural gas facility in Louisiana upon becoming president; and called the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act “so bad” because “we put up billions of dollars for rich companies.” Trump also spoke on Sunday from New York City’s Madison Square Garden alongside Elon Musk, where he incorrectly claimed that FEMA “[hasn’t] even responded in North Carolina.”
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.
Pollutants from gas stoves shorten people’s lives by an average of two years, according to a new study by scientists at Jaume I University in Spain. The research, which looked at households in the U.K. and EU, attributed 40,000 deaths per year in Europe to gas stoves, which leak pollutants linked to heart and lung diseases. “Way back in 1978, we first learned that NO2 pollution is many times greater in kitchens using gas than electric cookers,” lead author Juana María Delgado-Saborit told The Guardian. “But only now are we able to put a number on the amount of lives being cut short.”
A separate study in May estimated that 19,000 U.S. adults die annually due to pollution linked to their gas stoves. While awareness of the dangers of gas stoves is still growing, efforts in the U.S. to transition to safer and cleaner cooktops include measures on local ballots as well as the New York Power Authority and NYC Housing Authority’s Induction Stove Challenge. Heatmap exclusively reported on Friday that the judges selected Copper, which will provide 10,000 induction stove units to help transition the city’s public housing away from gas stoves.
Almost two-thirds of the United States is currently experiencing “some level of water stress related to drought,” according to a newly updated Drought Aware map from Esri. Using data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, the USDA, the National Water Model, and other government agencies, the new maps can show users weekly national drought conditions ranging from 2000 to 2024. According to the maps, roughly 4% of the country is currently experiencing “exceptional drought” — which describes “widespread crop/pasture losses” and “shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells [creating] water emergencies” — including parts of Montana, Texas, West Virginia, and Ohio.
Esri
Ahead of COP29, the Britain-based poverty nonprofit Oxfam is encouraging world leaders to “ban or punitively tax carbon-intensive luxury consumption — starting with private jets and superyachts.” The demand accompanies a new Oxfam study linking the emissions from the “luxury toys” of the wealthiest 1% of Europeans to climate impacts that disproportionately affect low- and lower-middle-income nations. “One of the key findings for us is that superyachts are by far the most polluting toy that a billionaire can own, except perhaps for a rocket ship,” one of the authors, Alex Maitland, told The Guardian. According to Oxfam, the average annual carbon footprint of billionaire-owned superyachts is over 6,000 tons — “more than three times the emissions of the billionaires’ private jets,” or the equivalent of 860 years of emissions for the average person in the world.
Globally averaged surface CO2 reached 420.0 parts per million in 2023, a new record, the World Meteorological Organization reported Monday. WMO’s bulletin, which is published annually, stressed that CO2 had risen 42.9 ppm, or 11.4%, over the past two decades. The 2023 increase was higher than in 2022, which the researchers attributed to fire emissions, reduced plant carbon uptake due to extreme heat stress, and industrial activities. “These are more than just statistics,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. “Every part per million and every fraction of a degree temperature increase has a real impact on our lives and our planet.”
The Dutch design studio What If Lab makes tiny homes inside decommissioned wind turbine nacelles. Renew Economy described the abodes, which debuted during Dutch Design Week, as having a “cozy cottage feel” and smart amenities like “a heat pump, solar panels, and a solar water heater.”
What If Lab
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Current conditions: Two people are missing after torrential rains in Catalonia • The daily high will be over 115 degrees Fahrenheit every day this week in Baghdad, Iraq • The search for victims of the Texas floods is paused due to a new round of rains and flooding in the Hill Country.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the Federal Emergency Management Agency after The New York Times reported it failed to answer nearly two-thirds of the calls placed to its disaster assistance line by victims of the Central Texas floods. Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Noem repudiated reports by the Times and Reuters that her requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, as well as the deployment of other critical resources, created bottlenecks during the crucial hours after the floodwaters receded. “Those claims are absolutely false,” she said.
Noem additionally denied reports that FEMA’s failure to renew the contracts of call-center contractors created a slowdown at the agency. Per the Times’ reporting, FEMA allowed its call center contract extension to expire on the night of July 5, in the midst of the unfolding disaster. During the day on July 5, FEMA answered the calls of 99.7% of survivors seeking one-time assistance for their immediate needs, the Times’ reporting shows; after FEMA failed to renew the contracts and hundreds of contractors were fired, the answer rate dropped to just 35.8% on July 6, and 15.9% on July 7. “Those contracts were in place, no employees were off of work,” Noem told Meet the Press. (Reuters reports that an internal FEMA document shows Noem approved the call center contracts as of July 10.)
At least 120 people died in the flash floods in Texas’ Hill Country over the Fourth of July weekend, with more than 160 people still missing. FEMA has fired or bought out at least 2,000 full-time employees since the start of the year, though since the floods, the Trump administration has reframed its push to “abolish” FEMA as “rebranding” FEMA, instead.
The Trump administration last week fired the final handful of employees who worked at the Office of Global Change, the division of the State Department that focused on global climate negotiations. Per The Washington Post, the employees were the final group at the department working on issues of international climate policy, and were part of bigger cuts to the agency that will see nearly 3,000 staffers out of work. “The Department is undertaking a significant and historic reorganization to better align our workforce activities and programs with the America First foreign policy priorities,” the State Department told the Post in a statement about the shuttering of the office.
Grand Canyon Lodge employees pictured on July 20, 1930. NPS/George Grant
The historic Grand Canyon Lodge burned down in the nearly 6,000-acre Dragon Bravo Fire in Arizona over the weekend. The rustic lodge, located on the Canyon’s remote North Rim, had stood since 1937, when it was rebuilt after a kitchen fire, and was the only hotel located inside the boundaries of the national park.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs called for an investigation into the National Park Service’s handling of the fire, which destroyed an additional 50 to 80 structures on the park’s North Rim. “An incident of this magnitude demands intense oversight and scrutiny into the federal government’s emergency response,” she said, adding that “Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park.” The Dragon Bravo Fire is one of two wildfires burning on the park’s north side and began after a lightning strike on July 4. The famous Phantom Ranch, located inside the canyon, and popular Bright Angel Trail and Havasupai Gardens, were also closed to hikers as of Sunday due to the fires.
Late last week, the local government of Nantucket reached a settlement with GE Vernova for $10.5 million to compensate for the tourism and business losses that resulted from the July 2024 turbine failure at Vineyard Wind 1. The town will use the money to establish a Community Claims Fund to provide compensation to affected parties.
The incident involved a 350-foot blade from a GE Vernova turbine that split off and fell into the water during construction of Vineyard Wind. Debris washed up onshore, temporarily closing some of the Massachusetts island’s iconic beaches during the height of tourist season. “The backlash was swift,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reported at the time. “Nantucket residents immediately wrote to Nantucket’s Select Board to ask the town to stop the construction of any additional offshore wind turbines.” Though significant errors like blade failures are incredibly rare, as my colleague Jael Holzman has also reported, the disaster could not have come at a worse time for Vineyard Wind, which subsequently saw its expansion efforts stymied by the Trump administration.
A group of young people filed a complaint last week against the federal government, claiming that the Trump administration has violated their right to good health and a stable environment, Inside Climate News reports. Our Children’s Trust represents the plaintiffs — the same Oregon group that brought Held v. Montana, which successfully argued that the state violated young people’s constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, as well as the groundbreaking climate case Juliana v. United States, which the Supreme Court declined to hear this spring.
The new lawsuit hinges on the claim that several of Trump’s executive orders, including his declaration of a National Energy Emergency and his reinvigoration of the coal industry, knowingly increase fossil-fuel pollution that will have poor health impacts on current and future generations. The plaintiffs range in age from 7 to 25 and come from all over the country.
More than half of all the soybean oil produced in the United States next year will be used to make biofuel, according to a new outlook by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The multi-faceted investment is defense-oriented, but could also support domestic clean energy.
MP Materials is the national champion of American rare earths, and now the federal government is taking a stake.
The complex deal, announced Thursday, involves the federal government acting as a guaranteed purchaser of MP Materials’ output, a lender, and also an investor in the company. In addition, the Department of Defense agreed to a price floor for neodymium-praseodymium products of $110 per kilogram, about $50 above its current spot price.
MP Materials owns a rare earths mine and processing facility near the California-Nevada border on the edges of the Mojave National Preserve. It claims to be “the largest producer of rare earth materials in the Western Hemisphere,” with “the only rare earth mining and processing site of scale in North America.”
As part of the deal, the company will build a “10X Facility” to produce magnets, which the DOD has guaranteed will be able to sell 100% of its output to some combination of the Pentagon and commercial customers. The DOD is also kicking in $150 million worth of financing for MP Materials’ existing processing efforts in California, alongside $1 billion from Wall Street — specifically JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — for the new magnet facility. The company described the deal in total as “a multi-billion-dollar commitment to accelerate American rare earth supply chain independence.”
Finally, the DOD will buy $400 million worth of newly issued stock in MP Materials, giving it a stake in the future production that it’s also underwriting.
Between the equity investment, the lending, and the guaranteed purchasing, the Pentagon, and by extension the federal government, has taken on considerable financial risk in casting its lot with a company whose primary asset’s previous owner went bankrupt a decade ago. But at least so far, Wall Street is happy with the deal: MP Materials’ market capitalization soared to over $7 billion on Thursday after its share price jumped over 40%, from a market capitalization of around $5 billion on Wednesday and the company is valued at around $7.5 billion as of Friday afternoon.
Despite the risk, former Biden administration officials told me they would have loved to make a deal like this.
When I asked Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for the National Economic Council in the Biden White House, whether he wished he could’ve overseen something like the DOD deal with MP Materials, he replied, “100%.” I put the same question to Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, a former Department of Energy official who is now an investor; she said, “Absolutely.”
Rare earths and critical minerals were of intense interest to the Biden administration because of their use in renewable energy and energy storage. Magnets made with neodymium-praseodymium oxide are used in the electric motors found in EVs and wind turbines, as well as for various applications in the defense industry.
MP Materials will likely have to continue to rely on both sets of customers. Building up a real domestic market for the China-dominated industry will likely require both sets of buyers. According to a Commerce Department report issued in 2022, “despite their importance to national security, defense demand for … magnets is only a small portion of overall demand and insufficient to support an economically viable domestic industry.”
The Biden administration previously awarded MP Materials $58.5 million in 2024 through the Inflation Reduction Act’s 48C Advanced Energy Project tax credit to support the construction of a magnet facility in Fort Worth. While the deal did not come with the price guarantees and advanced commitment to purchase the facility’s output of the new agreement, GM agreed to come on as an initial buyer.
Matt Sloustcher, an MP Materials spokesperson, confirmed to me that the Texas magnet facility is on track to be fully up and running by the end of this year, and that other electric vehicle manufacturers could be customers of the new facility announced on Thursday.
At the time MP Materials received that tax credit award, the federal government was putting immense resources behind electric vehicles, which bolstered the overall supply supply chain and specifically demand for components like magnets. That support is now being slashed, however, thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will cancel consumer-side subsidies for electric vehicle purchases.
While the Biden tax credit deal and the DOD investment have different emphases, they both follow on years of bipartisan support for MP Materials. In 2020, the DOD used its authority under the Defense Production Act to award almost $10 million to MP Materials to support its investments in mineral refining. At the time, the company had been ailing in part due to retaliatory tariffs from China, cutting off the main market for its rare earths. The company was shipping its mined product to China to be refined, processed, and then used as a component in manufacturing.
“Currently, the Company sells the vast majority of its rare earth concentrate to Shenghe Resources,” MP Materials the company said in its 2024 annual report, referring to a Chinese rare earths company.
The Biden administration continued and deepened the federal government’s relationship with MP Materials, this time complementing the defense investments with climate-related projects. In 2022, the DOD awarded a contract worth $35 million to MP Materials for its processing project in order to “enable integration of [heavy rare earth elements] products into DoD and civilian applications, ensuring downstream [heavy rare earth elements] industries have access to a reliable feedstock supplier.”
While the DOD deal does not mean MP Materials is abandoning its energy customers or focus, the company does appear to be to the new political environment. In its February earnings release, the company mentioned “automaker” or “automotive-grade magnets” four times; in its May earnings release, that fell to zero times.
Former Biden administration officials who worked on critical minerals and energy policy are still impressed.
The deal is “a big win for the U.S. rare earths supply chain and an extremely sophisticated public-private structure giving not just capital, but strategic certainty. All the right levers are here: equity, debt, price floor, and offtake. A full-stack solution to scale a startup facility against a monopoly,” Zumwalt-Forbes, the former Department of Energy official, wrote on LinkedIn.
While the U.S. has plentiful access to rare earths in the ground, Zumwalt-Forbes told me, it has “a very underdeveloped ability to take that concentrate away from mine sites and make useful materials out of them. What this deal does is it effectively bridges that gap.”
The issue with developing that “midstream” industry, Jacquez told me, is that China’s world-leading mining, processing, and refining capacity allows it to essentially crash the price of rare earths to see off foreign competitors and make future investment in non-Chinese mining or processing unprofitable. While rare earths are valuable strategically, China’s whip hand over the market makes them less financially valuable and deters investment.
“When they see a threat — and MP is a good example — they start ramping up production,” he said. Jacquez pointed to neodymium prices spiking in early 2022, right around when the Pentagon threw itself behind MP Materials’ processing efforts. At almost exactly the same time, several state-owned Chinese rare earth companies merged. Neodymium-praseodymium oxide prices fell throughout 2022 thanks to higher Chinese production quotas — and continued to fall for several years.
While the U.S. has plentiful access to rare earths in the ground, Zumwalt-Forbes told me, it has “a very underdeveloped ability to take that concentrate out away from mine sites and make useful materials out of them. What this deal does is it effectively bridges that gap.”
The combination of whipsawing prices and monopolistic Chinese capacity to process and refine rare earths makes the U.S.’s existing large rare earth reserves less commercially viable.
“In order to compete against that monopoly, the government needed to be fairly heavy handed in structuring a deal that would both get a magnet facility up and running and ensure that that magnet facility stays in operation and weathers the storm of Chinese price manipulation,” Zumwalt-Forbes said.
Beyond simply throwing money around, the federal government can also make long-term commitments that private companies and investors may not be willing or able to make.
“What this Department of Defense deal did is, yes, it provided much-needed cash. But it also gave them strategic certainty around getting that facility off the ground, which is almost more important,” Zumwalt-Forbes said.
“I think this won’t be the last creative critical mineral deal that we see coming out of the Department of Defense,” Zumwalt-Forbes added. They certainly are in pole position here, as opposed to the other agencies and prior administrations.”
On a new plan for an old site, tariffs on Canada, and the Grain Belt Express
Current conditions: Phoenix will “cool” to 108 degrees Fahrenheit today after hitting 118 degrees on Thursday, its hottest day of the year so far • An extreme wildfire warning is in place through the weekend in Scotland • University of Colorado forecasters decreased their outlook for the 2025 hurricane season to 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, and three major hurricanes after a quiet June and July.
President Trump threatened a 35% tariff on Canadian imports on Thursday, giving Prime Minister Mark Carney a deadline of August 1 before the levies would go into effect. The move follows months of on-again, off-again threats against Canada, with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau having successfully staved off the tariffs during talks in February. Despite those earlier negotiations, Trump held firm on his 50% tariff on steel and aluminum, which will have significant implications for green manufacturing.
As my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Robinson Meyer have written, tariffs on Canadian imports will affect the flow of oil, minerals, and lumber, as well as possibly break automobile supply chains in the United States. It was unclear as of Thursday, however, whether Trump’s tariffs “would affect all Canadian goods, or if he would follow through,” The New York Times reports. The move follows Trump’s announcement this week of tariffs on several other significant trade partners like Japan and South Korea, as well as a 50% tariff on copper.
The long beleaguered Lava Ridge Wind Project, formally halted earlier this year by an executive order from President Trump, might have a second life as the site for small modular reactors, Idaho News 6 reports. Sawtooth Energy Development Corporation has proposed installing six small nuclear power generators on the former Lava Ridge grounds in Jerome County, Idaho, drawn to the site by the power transmission infrastructure that could connect the region to the Midpoint Substation and onto the rest of the Western U.S. The proposed SMR project would be significantly smaller in scale than Lava Ridge, which would have produced 1,000 megawatts of electricity on a 200,000-acre footprint, sitting instead on 40 acres and generating 462 megawatts, enough to power 400,000 homes.
Sawtooth Energy plans to hold four public meetings on the proposal beginning July 21. The Lava Ridge Wind Project had faced strong local opposition — we named it the No. 1 most at-risk project of the energy transition last fall — due in part to concerns about the visibility of the turbines from the Minidoka National Historic Site, the site of a Japanese internment camp.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said on social media Thursday that Energy Secretary Chris Wright had assured him that he will be “putting a stop to the Grain Belt Express green scam.” The Grain Belt Express is an 804-mile-long, $11 billion planned transmission line that would connect wind farms in Kansas to energy consumers in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, which has been nearing construction after “more than a decade of delays,” The New York Times reports. But earlier this month, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, put in a request for the local public service commission to reconsider its approval, claiming that the project had overstated the number of jobs it would create and the cost savings for customers. Hawley has also been a vocal critic of the project and had asked the Energy Department to cancel its conditional loan guarantee for the transmission project.
New electric vehicles sold in Europe are significantly more environmentally friendly than gas cars, even when battery production is taken into consideration, according to a new study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. Per the report, EVs produce 73% less life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than combustion engine cars, even considering production — a 24% improvement over 2021 estimates. The gains are also owed to the large share of renewable energy sources in Europe, and factor in that “cars sold today typically remain on the road for about 20 years, [and] continued improvement of the electricity mix will only widen the climate benefits of battery electric cars.” The gains are exclusive to battery electric cars, however; “other powertrains, including hybrids and plug-in hybrids, show only marginal or no progress in reducing their climate impacts,” the report found.
Aryna Sabalenka attempts to cool down during her Ladies' Singles semi-final at Wimbledon on Thursday.Julian Finney/Getty Images
With the United Kingdom staring down its third heatwave in a month this week, a new study warns of dire consequences if homes and cities do not adapt to the new climate reality. According to researchers at the University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, heat-related deaths in England and Wales could rise 50-fold by the 2070s, jumping from a baseline of 634 deaths to 34,027 in a worst-case scenario of 4.3 degrees Celsius warming, a high-emissions pathway.
The report specifically cited the aging populations of England and Wales, as older people become more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme heat. Low adoption of air conditioning is also a factor: only 2% to 5% of English households use air conditioning, although that number may grow to 32% by 2050. “We can mitigate [the] severity” of the health impacts of heat “by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and with carefully planned adaptations, but we have to start now,” UCL researcher Clare Heaviside told Sky News.
This week, Centerville, Ohio, rolled out high-tech recycling trucks that will use AI to scan the contents of residents’ bins and flag when items have been improperly sorted. “Reducing contamination in our recycling system lowers processing costs and improves the overall efficiency of our collection,” City Manager Wayne Davis said in a statement about the AI pilot program, per the Dayton Daily News.