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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
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The political marriage of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the EV mogul and world’s richest man, has significantly changed the outlook for what the Trump administration might mean for energy policy, decarbonization, and the rule of law.
Musk has taken over numerous offices responsible for crucial functions within the federal government, including the Office of Personnel Management at the White House. Musk has snatched control of the federal government’s payments system, and he and his team have illegally tried to use it to block payments to federal programs, according to CNN and The New York Times. Conservative budget experts say that such a move violates the Constitution, which grants sole control over the power of the purse to Congress.
What’s the issue? The problem here is not primarily that Musk is unelected — there are lots of powerful people in every administration who are not elected (though few have ever had as many conflicts of interest as Musk, the CEO of the world’s most valuable automaker in Tesla and the holder of many government contracts via the rocket company SpaceX and satellite internet provider Starlink). Nor would it be a problem if Musk were merely trying to modernize the government’s IT systems.
The problem is that Musk has used his control of a technical system — the software that the government uses to send more than a billion payments a year — to assert effective control over federal programs and policies. This is why Musk trying to shut off payments that have been appropriated by Congress matters: He is in essence saying that because he can do something with the software, he may do it.
The issue is that the government can do many things that it broadly does not do because they are illegal.
But Trump and Musk together are now testing the limits of the law.
The Trump administration is operating on a legal theory that the president can simply decide not to spend money that has been appropriated by Congress. Key officials in the Trump administration argue that Congress sets a ceiling, but not a floor, when it appropriates federal funding. It also believes that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which Congress passed during the Nixon administration, is unconstitutional.
I find it hard to believe that the Supreme Court — which last year severely limited the executive branch’s ability to interpret congressional laws which create and govern agencies — agrees with Trump that the president can ignore those same laws when they govern federal spending. But the Court has reached shocking decisions on Trump’s behalf before.
Trump’s team seems to be trying to make this legal theory central to how his entire administration works. Impoundment underpinned the White House’s attempt last month to block all outgoing federal grants and loans, which briefly threw the government into chaos before it was blocked by a judge and ultimately rescinded.
Musk’s ploy, seemingly, is to move so fast that these legal and constitutional questions become moot. If he can close a federal agency’s offices, put its workers on leave, and cut off funding to its programs, then perhaps it won’t matter what a judge says about impoundment itself. And if Musk can control the tap of public money, turning it on and off at will, then he can usurp the operation of the United States government.
In the world of climate and energy, Musk’s prominence — and the lack of precedent for his situation — raises important questions for businesses and policy makers. Here is what we do not know about Musk today:
In 2010, the federal government issued a $465 million loan to Tesla so that it could build a factory in California for its Model S sedan.
In recent years, the government has made similar deals, lending tens of billions of dollars to other companies that make electric vehicles or that mine and refine critical minerals.
Last month, the Biden administration closed a $6.57 billion loan to Rivian, the electric truck maker, so that it could build a new factory in Georgia.
Some of these new borrowers, including Rivian and legacy automakers like Ford, compete with Tesla. It is still unclear whether Musk will be able to use his control of the federal government’s checkbook to cut off some loans and allow others to proceed. Doing so would ultimately stifle competition in the EV sector, benefitting Tesla, where Musk remains CEO.
The White House said this week that Trump is allowing Musk to police his own conflicts of interest.
In December, Musk called for Congress to “get rid” of the clean energy tax credits created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Most tax credits are claimed by companies against what they owe on their taxes, meaning that they result in negative revenue to the government. But the IRA created a new kind of credit — a so-called “direct payment” — that allowed states, schools, churches, tribes, and other entities without federal tax liability to claim money for installing clean energy or buying electric vehicles.
Those payments — and any other tax refunds — ultimately run through the Treasury Department’s computer systems. It remains unclear whether Musk can use control of the federal government’s checkbook to block the payout of these payments.
One of Musk’s initiatives, the U.S. DOGE Service, is housed at the General Services Administration, or GSA.
The GSA is the government’s internal landlord and facilities manager — it owns, builds, and manages federal office space. It also operates parts of the federal vehicle fleet.
Under the Biden administration, it undertook a number of energy sustainability and efficiency initiatives. Some of these programs were canceled by President Trump’s initial set of executive orders, but the full scope of Musk’s authority in the agency remains unclear.
Last year, the U.S. military was investigating whether Elon Musk complied with the rules of his security clearance, according to The New York Times.
At the time, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, had already declined to pursue the highest level security clearance for Musk, in part because of reports around his open drug use and contact with foreign leaders, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk is reported to hold a “Top Secret” clearance.
The Journal has also previously reported that Musk conducted secret conversations with Vladimir Putin and that Musk’s drug use worries Tesla and SpaceX executives.
Tesla has deep ties in China. It achieved record sales in China last year, although its market share has fallen as Chinese EV companies have out-competed its aging vehicle line-up. Tesla is reportedly opening a new factory in Shanghai this month. Musk has also staked out public positions that favor the Chinese Community Party’s views. In 2022, he suggested that Taiwan could become a “special administrative zone” of the People’s Republic of China.
It’s unclear how these commitments might affect his work for the U.S. government.
Three tactics from Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, on how the industry can use this time wisely.
Erin Burns has been here before. The executive director of Carbon180, a carbon removal research and policy nonprofit, joined the organization as its first policy director in 2018, partway through Donald Trump’s first term as president. It was under that administration that she helped win the first ever dedicated federal research and development funding for carbon removal, a modest $60 million in 2019.
It’s a very different world today than it was then, so she wasn’t exactly here. There’s now billions of dollars in federal funding appropriated to pull carbon from the atmosphere — not just for research and development, but also for building commercial-scale projects and purchasing carbon removal services. At the same time, this new Trump administration is moving more quickly and aggressively than the last one to undo anything resembling climate policy, and future attempts to re-allocate some of that money are not out of the question.
I recently spoke to Burns about how she’s looking to make progress on carbon removal under these circumstances. Here are my big takeaways from the conversation.
It’s not yet clear how the Trump administration or new Congress is going to act on existing carbon removal programs. Although the industry has a history of receiving bipartisan support and federally-funded carbon removal projects are happening in Republican states and districts, that doesn’t mean these programs are safe. “The rollback of certain policies are not ultimately going to be about how people feel about direct air capture or carbon removal,” Burns told me. “It’s going to be a broader ideology around the role of a place like the Department of Energy, and what kinds of supports the federal government should provide.”
With that in mind, Burns’ motto is “the best defense is a good offense.” That means working with the congresspeople who supported the direct air capture hubs to highlight why the government should continue investing in them. It also involves working with labor unions with members in heavy industry who see the jobs potential. It’s time to double down on a more expansive argument for the benefits of these projects, she said. “There are additional benefits to every carbon removal pathway. We should always be talking about them. Climate’s not going to be the argument that gets you those really durable political coalitions.”
Playing offense also means planning for the next opening. The reason the Biden administration made so much progress on carbon removal, Burns said, is that advocates like her spent two years under the Trump administration meeting weekly, developing policy and “socializing” it, so that it was “ready to go.” As policy enactment in Washington slows down, advocates will have more capacity to sit down and develop the next wave of ideas. To Burns, that means thinking about a more tailored, ground-up approach.
“To be honest, we don’t really have carbon removal policy in the United States,” Burns told me. “We have direct air capture policy, and even that is, like, point-source carbon capture policy that’s been tweaked to fit direct air capture.” An example is the 45Q tax credit, which was originally created to support projects that capture carbon from the smokestacks of coal plants, but was expanded to support direct air capture projects as well.
But carbon removal is not just direct air capture — it’s also planting trees and grinding rocks, activities that likely require different policies and supports than big air-sucking machines to scale up. Leveraging all that to its fullest extent will require a more expansive policy regime.
“Let’s start from scratch,” Burns said. “Start to grapple with the fundamental nature of carbon removal as a unique thing that isn’t going to be deployed only with the policies that we’ve used to deploy technologies like solar. Because carbon removal is not going to create electricity, for example. It’s not just about making it cheap enough that there’s going to be this market force. Making it cheaper is great, but you also have to think about the other barriers.”
Before coming to Carbon180, Burns worked at the center-left think tank Third Way on carbon capture and nuclear energy policy. While she was there, Trump proposed dramatically slashing the Department of Energy’s budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and eliminating the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which supports the early development of technologies that are too risky for private investment.
“You can get some unusual bedfellows together when you have an administration that’s trying to cut, say, all of the Department of Energy,” Burns said. Instead of renewable developers and nuclear power companies and carbon removal startups all fighting for a piece of the pie, there’s incentive to come together and “make sure the pie still exists.”
It’s not just about preserving funding. The carbon removal industry also needs to be making inroads with adjacent industries because they have common interests. Direct air capture facilities need renewable energy to operate. and right now the future of renewable energy is under major threat. Similarly, direct air capture projects need the Environmental Protection Agency to be well-staffed enough to continue permitting carbon sequestration wells — a process that was slow to start but starting to pick up at the end of Biden’s term. “I think there’s value in us thinking about what it means to not just defend carbon removal, but defend all of this climate infrastructure that is going to be necessary for us to be successful.”
In her past work on carbon capture, Burns grew familiar with a divide between players who were genuinely trying to fight climate change and those for whom carbon capture was just a line in their advertising budget. In her view, the carbon removal industry has been different, with most companies genuinely trying to do the right thing for the climate. It’s an open question as to whether that might change in this new political environment, she said.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy was staffed with some of the leading carbon removal experts in the country. Now there may be less pressure on companies to have high standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying carbon removal outcomes — meaning more of an opening to fudge the truth of how much benefit their projects are providing.
The Trump administration is also scaling back the size of agencies’ staff and removing requirements for companies that receive financial assistance to do things like ensure that the communities hosting their projects also benefit from them. Burns said the onus is on organizations like Carbon180 and on corporate carbon removal buyers to maintain high standards not just for measurement, but also for community engagement. “If you care about deploying CDR, you need to care about local support for those projects,” she said.
For one, community opposition can shut down a project. But also, bringing benefits to host communities helps build political support for carbon removal that can lead to more federal aid down the line. “Those are keys for long-term success.”
A conversation with Peter Bonner, senior fellow for the Federation of American Scientists
This week’s Q&A is with Peter Bonner, senior fellow for the Federation of American Scientists. I reached out to Peter because this week, as I was breaking stories about chaos in renewables permitting, his organization released a report he helped author that details how technology and hiring challenges are real bottlenecks in the federal environmental review process. We talked about this report, which was the culmination of 18 months of research and involved detailed interviews with federal permitting staff.
The following interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay so walk me through why you did this report.
The reason for doing the report was to look at, why is permitting a bottleneck? What are some things that can improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of permitting to get permits done better and faster?
Depending on the type of permitting project and where the infrastructure is getting built, permitting could be very, very difficult, or it could go more easily. It depends on the number of stakeholders involved. It depends on the type of permitting project it is. But it also depends on each agency doing permitting somewhat differently, and leaning on different types of technology to enable them to do permitting better.
One agency may have one configuration of a permitting team and in another agency, that configuration of a permitting team may be quite different, sometimes independent of the type of permitting project they’re talking about. So there’s a need for greater consistency in how those teams are built, and also the skill and talent that goes into those teams and how they work with contractors to get the permits done.
In addition, each agency is leaning on their own types of technologies on case management and how to run the permitting project instead of there being consistency around the technologies they use as well.
What went into this report?
There were a couple pieces to it. One is a set of pretty extensive interviews with permitting program managers, hiring managers, and HR specialists who were bringing people into agencies to help with permitting functions and programs. We also did significant extensive research into the permitting process and what technologies permitting teams were using to document and guide their work in adherence to regulations. So a lot of it was primary research working directly with the agencies and the people who were on the ground doing the permitting.
How much of the backlog in permitting is Congress? Or is it just the executive branch?
Clarity in the laws and regulations that guide permitting – there’s still work there to be done. But our focus was less on laws and regulations and more around, how are permitting teams actually getting the work done? What talent do they need on those teams? What technologies can they use to support their work?
So you’re telling me a big issue might really be the government’s load bearing infrastructure, so to speak. Is it really just the back-end? The pipes?
A decent amount of it is the pipes and getting the right people in place.
The permitting workforce has been wanting for people and skillsets even before the increase in infrastructure spending over the past few years. You’re looking at a workforce that did not have enough people to do the job before this influx of projects came in.
It therefore depended on bringing in people and contracting people to do that work as well. And in the hiring process, we found significant delays in recruiting for permitting talent..
What we found was a lot of delays due to the bureaucracy around hiring that I think is well-documented in other places [in government]. Doing more, clear skills-based assessments up-front when you’re evaluating people for jobs so that highly qualified people then make it to the list that you can hire from. Making sure people get through the background check process properly. There’s lots of things that delay getting people on board faster and also reaching out and recruiting the right sorts of folks.
To what extent do you think your recommendations here on the pipes, so to speak, will have an audience with this administration? I’m particularly curious given all the headlines we’re seeing about staff reductions in the federal government.
It’s hard to project that and there’s a lot of clarity that needs still to come in terms of how this administration is viewing supporting permitting teams and the agencies to make sure that they can do their jobs better. The real answers to that are still to come.
I think there’s a lot of change going on in the permitting regulatory environment, the regulations. There’s also executive orders, legal decisions that have come down lately. We’re in a dynamic, changing situation.
My hope is that the administration would recognize that, take a look at the report we have and take a look at investing in the right people and the right technologies.