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Fat Bear Week Is Saved at the 11th Hour

The social media sensation is back, thanks to bipartisanship.

10/02/2023

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Over the weekend, Congress (temporarily) got its act together and passed a 45-day stopgap bill to avoid a government shutdown. Federal agencies will remain open, and the deal even includes an additional $16 billion in federal disaster assistance.

This is all well and good, but one thing is especially important: the National Park Service is funded, which means the employees of Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska will be going to work this week, which means Fat Bear Week is continuing as planned.

Fat Bear Week is, rightly, a sensation. More than one million people voted in last year's contest, which was briefly rocked by revelations of vote-stuffing before a bear nicknamed 747 was crowned the winner:

— (@)

Fat Bear Week is run by national park employees, however, and a spokesperson told the AP that a shutdown would have meant a change in schedule. If a delay went on for too long, the bears could have gone into hibernation before voting began.

But! Fear not. Thanks to a rare (dare I say heroic?) showing of bipartisanship in the House, Fat Bear Week begins as planned on Wednesday, October 4, and ends next Tuesday, October 10 — Fat Bear Tuesday. You can cast your vote on the Fat Bear Week website: https://explore.org/fat-bear-week

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Neel Dhanesha

Neel is a former founding staff writer at Heatmap. Prior to Heatmap, he was a science and climate reporter at Vox, an editorial fellow at Audubon magazine, and an assistant producer at Radiolab, where he helped produce The Other Latif, a series about one detainee's journey to Guantanamo Bay. He is a graduate of the Literary Reportage program at NYU, which helped him turn incoherent scribbles into readable stories, and he grew up (mostly) in Bangalore. He tweets sporadically at @neel_dhan.

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The Mad Dash to Lock Down Biden’s Final Climate Dollars

Companies are racing to finish the paperwork on their Department of Energy loans.

Katie Brigham •

12/05/2024

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Of the over $13 billion in loans and loan guarantees that the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office has made under Biden, nearly a third of that funding has been doled out in the month since the presidential election. And of the $41 billion in conditional commitments — agreements to provide a loan once the borrower satisfies certain preconditions — that proportion rises to nearly half. That includes some of the largest funding announcements in the office’s history: more than $7.5 billion to StarPlus Energy for battery manufacturing, $4.9 billion to Grain Belt Express for a transmission project, and nearly $6.6 billion to the electric vehicle company Rivian to support its new manufacturing facility in Georgia.

The acceleration represents a clear push by the outgoing Biden administration to get money out the door before President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to hollow out much of the Department of Energy, takes office. Still, there’s a good chance these recent conditional commitments won’t become final before the new administration takes office, as that process involves checking a series of nontrivial boxes that include performing due diligence, addressing or mitigating various project risks, and negotiating financing terms. And if the deals aren’t finalized before Trump takes office, they’re at risk of being paused or cancelled altogether, something the DOE considers unwise, to put it lightly.

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Fat Bear Week Is Saved at the 11th Hour

The social media sensation is back, thanks to bipartisanship.

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