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Earlier this month, an odd little ad began appearing on TVs in Michigan. On first watch, it plays like any other political advertisement you’d see on television this time of year. In it, Michigan governor and Biden surrogate Gretchen Whitmer touts the high-paying electric vehicle manufacturing jobs that the Democratic administration has brought to her state. Watch the spot a few times, though, and it soon becomes clear what it’s missing.
Climate change.
The 30-second ad by Evergreen Action, an advocacy group linked to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, promotes “electric cars that power our economy and our future,” “training Michigan workers for high-paying jobs,” and policies that are “good for our economy.” This is all clearly referencing programs in the Inflation Reduction Act, arguably the most significant piece of climate legislation ever enacted in the United States, and yet the spot doesn’t once mention the one big upside all these upsides have in common. According to new polling that Third Way, a center-left think tank, shared exclusively with Heatmap News, that’s a good thing.
“Climate, as a message, is not going to drive turnout,” Emily Becker, the deputy director of communications for Third Way’s climate and energy team, told me.
While most Americans believe the planet is warming due to human activity and overwhelmingly want the government to do something about it, “climate change” — at least in those words — is almost never their most important issue. According to prior polling by Third Way and confirmed in issue polls run by firms like Pew, voters who say the economy is their No. 1 priority make up a plurality of the electorate, while “climate-first” voters represent a much smaller (and typically, whiter, older, and wealthier) subsection.
The new poll, conducted in mid-May and released on Monday, was done in partnership with Impact Research, a progressive polling firm that also works directly with Biden. What Third Way wanted was a better understanding of when and where climate becomes a make-or-break issue. The results show that just over half of Americans (54%) would back a candidate who views clean energy as a priority. When presented with the hypothetical of picking between a candidate who wants immediate climate action and one who “feels we must address inflation before combating climate change,” the numbers dip; just 40% of respondents said they’d vote for the former candidate, and 47% picked the inflation-busting latter.
Of course, this is a made-up scenario. For one thing, the clean energy build-out is inflation-busting, and lest we forget, the 2024 election is between a candidate who passed the most substantial climate legislation in U.S. history and one who still claims climate change is a hoax. But inflation is the heavy-weight issue in America right now. “People are going to prioritize anything that impacts them personally,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, a strategic communications consultant and the host of the podcast Words to Win By, told me.
Shenker-Osorio said she interprets the candidate question as a victory for climate advocates. Sure, when forced to make a binary, zero-sum choice between climate and inflation, the respondents to this poll chose the latter — but only by 7 points, and with a margin of error of 3.1. Climate advocates have done an “extraordinary job to bring voters into a place where they’re only 7 points underwater on this make-believe question, where somehow tackling corporate price gouging and raising people’s wages can’t be done if we are also tackling climate change,” Shenker-Osorio told me.
Shenker-Osorio did agree, however, that the word “climate” needs to be used carefully, at risk of confusing or alienating voters. “I’m not arguing that the winner here is to say ‘climate change’ over and over and over again,” she said. “I also don’t use that in my messaging. It’s way too abstract.” Shenker-Osorio pointed to phrases like “damage to our climate” instead, and stressed to me that it is important for Democratic candidates and their surrogates to “present a positive vision, which is: the clean energy future is ours for the taking.”
Becker, of Third Way, acknowledged that the question presented a blatantly artificial scenario, but argued that “using measures that can be imperfect can still be revelatory in terms of how individuals think about this issue.” For example, while emissions reduction is an obvious upside of clean energy — it’s literally emphasized in the name! — the polling confirmed that centering discussions of things like solar power and EVs on the high-paying jobs and cost-saving upsides was more productive than opining about saving the planet.
Finding the right balance might not seem too hard, but when you have a 30-second ad spot running in living rooms across Michigan, every single word needs to be high impact. And manufacturing electric cars because they “power our economy and our future?” That’s an upside everyone can agree on.
As extreme weather becomes the norm, utilities are scrambling to improve the grid’s resilience, aiming to prevent the types of outages and infrastructure damage that often magnify the impact of already disastrous weather events. Those events cost the U.S. $182 billion in damages last year alone.
With the intensity of storms, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires growing every year, some utilities are now turning to artificial intelligence in their quest to adapt to new climate realities. Rhizome, which just announced a $6.5 million seed round, uses AI to help assess and prevent climate change-induced grid infrastructure vulnerabilities. It’s already working with utilities such as Avangrid, Seattle City Light, and Vermont Electric Power Company to do so.
“With a combination of utility system data and historical weather and hazard information, and then climate projection information, we can build a full profile of likelihood and consequence of failure at a very high resolution,” Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mish Thadani told me.
While utilities often have lots of data about the history of their assets and the surrounding landscape, there’s no real holistic system to bring together these disparate datasets and provide a simple overview of systemic risk across a range of different scenarios. Utilities usually rely on historical data to make decisions about their assets — a practice that’s increasingly unhelpful as climate change makes previously rare extreme weather events more likely.
Rhizome aims to solve both problems, serving as an integrated platform for risk assessment and mitigation that incorporates forward-looking climate modeling into its projections. The company measures its success against modeled counterfactuals that determine avoided power outages and the economic losses associated with these hypothetical blackouts. “So we can say the anticipated failure rate across the system for a Category 1 hurricane was X, and after you invest in the system, it will be Y,” Thadani told me. “Or if you’ve made a bunch of investments in the system, and you do experience a Category 1 hurricane, what would have been the failure rate had those investments not been made?”
This allows utilities to provide regulators with much more robust data to back up their funding requests. So while Thadani expects electricity prices to continue to rise and ratepayers to bear the burden, he told me that Rhizome can ultimately help regulators and utilities keep costs in check by making sure that every dollar spent on risk mitigation goes as far as possible.
Rhizome’s seed round, which came in oversubscribed, was led by the early-stage tech-focused venture firm Base10 Partners, which aims to automate traditional sectors of the economy. Additional funders include climate investors MCJ and CLAI, as well as the wildfire-focused venture firm Convective Capital. In addition to its standard risk assessment system, Rhizome has also developed a wildfire-specific risk mitigation tool. This quantifies not only how likely a hazard is to occur and its potential impact on utility infrastructure, but also the probability that an equipment failure would spark a wildfire, based on the geography of the area and historical ignition data.
Thadani told me that he considers evaluating wildfire risk “to be the next step in a sequence” as a utility evaluates the threats to its system overall. So while customers can choose to adopt either the standard product or the wildfire-specific product, many could gain utility from both, he said. The company has also developed a third offering specifically tailored for municipal and cooperative utilities. This more affordable system doesn’t provide the same machine learning-powered cost-benefit metrics, but can still help these smaller entities evaluate their infrastructure’s vulnerability.
Right now, Rhizome has a “lean and mighty” team of just 11 people, Thadani told me. With this latest raise, he said that the company will immediately hire five or six engineers, primarily to do further research and development. As Rhizome looks to onboard more and larger customers, it’s planning to incorporate more advanced modeling features into its platform and operate it increasingly autonomously, such that the model can retrain itself as new weather, climate, and utility data becomes available.
The company is out of the pilot phase with most of its customers, Thadani said, having signed multiple enterprise software contracts. That’s big, as utilities have gained a reputation for showing an initial appetite for testing innovative technologies, only to balk at the cost of full-scale deployment. Thadani told me Rhizome has been able to avoid this so-called “pilot purgatory” by making a point to engage with senior-level stakeholders at utilities — not just the innovation teams — to “graduate from that pilot ecosystem more quickly.”
Exactly where China is in its energy transition remains somewhat fuzzy. Has the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases already hit peak emissions? Will it in 2025? That remains to be seen. But its import data for this year suggests an economy that’s in a rapid transition.
According to government trade data, in the first fourth months of this year, China imported $12.1 billion of coal, $100.4 billion of crude oil, and $18 billion of natural gas. In terms of value, that’s a 27% year over year decline in coal, a 8.5% decline in oil, and a 15.7% decline in natural gas. In terms of volume, it was a 5.3% decline, a slight 0.5% increase, and a 9.2% decline, respectively.
“Fossil fuel demand still trends down,” Lauri Myllyvirta, the co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, wrote on X in response to the news.
Morgan Stanley analysts predicted Friday in a note to clients that this “weak downstream demand” for coal in China would “continue to hinder coal import volume.”
Another piece of China’s emissions and coal usage puzzle came from Indonesia, which is a major coal exporter. Citing data from trade data service Kpler, Reuters reported Friday that Indonesia’s thermal coal exports “have dropped to their lowest in three years” thanks to “weak demand in China and India,” the world’s two biggest coal importers. Indonesia’s thermal coal exports dropped 12% annually to 150 million tons in the first third of the year, Reuters reported.
China’s official goal is to hit peak emissions by 2030 and reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060. The country’s electricity grid is largely fueled by coal (with hydropower coming in at number two), as is its prolific production of steel and cement, which is energy and, specifically, coal-intensive. For a few years in the 2010s, more cement was poured in China than in the whole 20th century in the United States. China also accounts for about half of the world’s steel production.
At the same time, China’s electricity demand growth is being largely met by renewables, implying that China can expand its economy without its economy-wide, annual emissions going up. This is in part due to a massive deployment of renewables. In 2023, China installed enough non-carbon-emitting electricity generation to meet the total electricity demand of all of France.
China’s productive capacity has shifted in a way that’s less carbon intensive, experts on the Chinese energy system and economy have told Heatmap. The economy isshifting more toward manufacturing and away from the steel-and-cement intensive breakneck urbanization of the past few decades, thanks to a dramatically slowing homebuilding sector.
Chinese urban residential construction was using almost 300 million tons of steel per year at its peak in 2019, according to research by the Reserve Bank of Australia, about a third of the country’s total steel usage. (Steel consumption for residential construction would fall by about half by 2023.) By contrast, the whole United States economy consumes less than 100 million tons of steel per year.
To the extent the overall Chinese economy slows down due to the trade war with the United States, coal usage — and thus greenhouse gas emissions — would slow as well. Although that hasn’t happened yet — China also released export data on Friday that showed sustained growth, in spite of the tariff barriers thrown up by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
