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Sparks

Why Cooling Centers Were Closed Last Week

Not a promising start to summer for urban emergency planners.

People staying cool.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

With a brutal heat dome still threatening parts of the United States, one more thing about this summer has become clear: Cities are struggling to protect their most vulnerable citizens from extreme temperatures.

Just last week, on Juneteenth, over 82 million Americans were under active National Weather Service extreme heat alerts — but, due to the national holiday, many publicly operated cooling centers were closed. While Boston had opened 14 new facilities in partnership with the Centers for Youth and Families, for instance, none of them stayed open Wednesday.

The same thing happened in New York, where more than 200 cooling centers were closed for the holiday, most of them libraries. While other heat preparedness measures were still in place — Gov. Kathy Hochul announced free admission for state parks — residents counting on a facility near home had to change plans last minute. On Sunday, New York turned 45 public schools into cooling centers, this time because the public libraries were closed due to budget cuts.

In Chicago, only one cooling center was open during the holiday. The lack of cooling spaces available sparked action from homelessness advocates, who are urging the city to offer more cooling centers that are open 24/7 and also to make those facilities available when the heat index is above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because cooling centers are often multi-purpose spaces, data on their usage is limited. In Boston, 245 people visited cooling centers from June 18 to 20, the mayor’s office told me. New York City’s Department of Emergency Management could only say that six people visited four of the schools open Sunday.

Emergency response services also attended more heat-related calls this past week. John Chisholm, chief of the Concord Fire Department, told The New York Times that the department received more calls than usual from seniors struggling with the heat on Tuesday. In New Hampshire, 39 individuals called 911 due to the heat on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — more than the total amount of calls the service received in all of June last year.

Cooling companies also struggled to meet demands. An HVAC company in Hartford, Connecticut told USA Today that it received about 100 calls for service per day last week — numbers usually only seen during peak summer temperatures in August. To protect its technicians, the company had to turn down requests from clients that would have required work in an attic.

Throughout the week, cities canceled activities like food markets, street fairs, Little League practices, and field trips, were due to the heat. Instead, people flocked to beaches. In Massachusetts, the number of people heading to the coast was so high on Wednesday that some were forced to head back home due to intense traffic and lack of parking spaces. One exception was New York’s annual Mermaid Parade, which went on as scheduled.

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Sparks

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

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

A clock and money.
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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Treasury Finalizes Another IRA Tax Credit Before You Know What

The expanded investment tax credit rules are out.

The Treasury Department building.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Treasury Department is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the tax rules that form the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act and its climate strategy. Today, Treasury has released final rules for the Section 48 Investment Tax Credit, which gives project owners (and/or their tax equity partners) 30% back on their investments in clean energy production.

The IRA-amended investment tax credit, plus its sibling production tax credit, are updates and expansion on tax policies that have been in place for decades supporting largely the solar and wind industries. To be clear, today’s announcement does not contain the final rules for the so-called “technology-neutral” clean electricity tax credits established under the IRA, which will supercede the existing investment and production tax credits beginning next year and for which all non-carbon emitting sources of energy can qualify.

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Trump’s OMB Pick Wants to Purge the Government of ‘Climate Fanaticism’

Re-meet the once and future director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.

Russ Vought.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

President-elect Donald Trump spent the Friday evening before Thanksgiving filling out nearly the rest of his Cabinet. He plans for his Treasury secretary to be a hedge fund manager who’s called the Inflation Reduction Act “the Doomsday machine for the deficit”; he’s named a vaccine safety skeptic to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and his pick to head the Department of Labor is a Republican congresswoman who may want to ease the enforcement of child labor rules if confirmed.

And — in one of the most consequential moves yet for America’s standing in the fight to mitigate climate change — Trump also named Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The decision comes as no surprise — Vought served as deputy director of the OMB under Trump in 2018 and took over the top job in 2019, serving until the end of Trump’s first presidency. The strategic communications group Climate Power had been sounding the alarm on his potential return to the office since this spring, which included sharing their research on him with me.

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