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:
Want to reduce meat consumption? Be direct with the climate pitch.
When I was a teen in the late aughts, the Washington Department of Health inflicted permanent damage to my psyche by airing intensely nightmarish anti-smoking commercials late at night on Adult Swim. (No really, you’ve been warned). The fact that a maggoty stop-motion sewer rat still flashes into my head when I think about smoking is a testament to the power of graphic visual dissuasion — even as the U.S. continues to use text-heavy warning labels on cigarette packs compared to the disturbing photographic labels affixed by most other countries.
In a new paper published in the journal Appetite on Wednesday, researchers at Durham University in the U.K. found evidence that graphic warning labels might be able to dissuade meat-eating, too. Taking inspiration from cigarette packets, the researchers created warning labels focused on the environment, health, or pandemic impacts of meat. The labels decreased a diner’s inclination to choose animal protein by up to 10%.
There are lots of good reasons for policymakers to discourage meat-eating: Red meat in particular has been linked to health risks like increased mortality; factory farming is a known pandemic catalyst; and a reduction of animal agriculture is likely necessary to meet national net-zero climate goals. But while it isn’t terribly surprising that a graphic warning label can ruin your appetite, what is curious is that diners appeared slightly more receptive to labels that warned about climate consequences than ones with health or pandemic warnings.
The researchers found that pandemic-focused labels reduced meat meal choices by 10%, health warning labels by 8.8%, and climate labels by 7.4%, but described this spread as not being statistically significant. Things got interesting, though, when researchers asked their subjects if they would support a policy that affixed such warnings to meat products; in that case, “support for the introduction of climate warning labels was significantly higher than support for the introduction of pandemic warning labels,” and higher, though “not significantly different to,” introducing health warning labels. This finding tracked with a pilot study in which the researchers had found “participants considered the impact of meat consumption on climate change as most consequential when compared to the impact on human health and future risk of pandemics.”
Also of note: Respondents found climate warning labels a little more believable than pandemic or health labels. Asked to rank the labels’ claims by credibility from 1 to 7, with 1 being the least credible, respondents gave climate an average of 4.85, followed by 4.3 for health and 3.69 for the pandemic. Admittedly, 4.85 is not exactly an overwhelming vouch of credibility; it means respondents were slightly more inclined to “agree” than “neither agree nor disagree.”
Overall, policy support was lackluster too, “with participants neither supporting nor opposing the introduction of climate warning labels, but opposing the introduction of health and pandemic warning labels,” the researchers wrote. Additionally, the subjects of the study were based in the U.K., where the belief that climate change is a major threat is about 7 points higher than in the U.S.; the researchers admitted these pre-existing environmental concerns could be why climate labels had an edge. Needless to say, Congress might not want to rush to this one.
Still, encouraging a lifestyle shift away from our current levels of meat consumption will almost certainly be necessary for the U.S. to meet its climate goals. One (oft-distorted) paper found that Americans would need to cut 50% of their consumption of animal-based foods to achieve a 51% reduction of diet-related emissions between 2016 and 2030. By another estimate, Americans would have to reduce their meat consumption by 82% to meet the 2019 sustainability recommendations laid out by the EAT-Lancet Commission. In either case, the 10% dissuasion rate brought about by meat warning labels would not be enough on its own — but it would be a significant step in the right direction.
Policymakers, health-care professionals, sustainability and animal welfare advocates, and any others who want to nudge consumers toward eating less meat might want to take note. Not because meat warning labels are on the table (let’s be honest, this is the U.S.: they’re not), but because the research shows the climate cause is a place where consumers are ever-so-slightly more receptive when it comes to setting down the steak knife. Just some food for thought.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
We’ll give you one guess as to what’s behind the huge spike.
Georgia is going to need a lot more electricity than it once thought. Again.
In a filing last week with the state’s utility regulator, Georgia Power disclosed that its projected load growth for the next decade from “economic development projects” has gone up by over 12,000 megawatts, to 36,500 megawatts. Just for 2028 to 2029, the pipeline has more than tripled, from 6,000 megawatts to 19,990 megawatts, destined for so-called “large load” projects like new data centers and factories.
To give you an idea of just how much power Georgia businesses will demand over the next decade, the two new recently booted up nuclear reactors at Vogtle each have a capacity of around 1,000 megawatts. Of the listed projects that may come online, five will require 1,000 megawatts or more.
The culprit is largely data centers. About 3,330 megawatts’ worth of data centers have broken ground in Georgia, and just over 4,100 megawatts are pending construction, vastly outstripping commitments made by industrial customers.
“New load growth, led predominately by data centers, could triple [Georgia Power’s] size, in ten years. This is the second industrial revolution, led by artificial intelligence,” Simon Mahan, the executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, wrote on X.
Georgia Power is used to upgrading load forecasts. The company had to update its three-year planning process (known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP) in October of 2023, just a year after releasing its previous three-year plan, as its five-year load growth projections had grown from 400 megawatts to 6,660 megawatts, a 17-fold increase. Regulators approved the new plan in April of this year, which included adding turbines to an existing gas-fired plant, pushing out the retirement of a coal-fired plant, and more battery storage.
The latest update, Georgia Power said in the filing, “should provide further certainty that Georgia Power’s load forecast is materializing and that the constructive outcome of the 2023 IRP Update is supportive of economic growth in Georgia.”
The signs marking projects funded by the current president’s infrastructure programs are all over the country.
Maybe you’ve seen them, the white or deep cerulean signs, often backdropped by an empty lot, roadblock, or excavation. The text on them reads PROJECT FUNDED BY President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Law, or maybe President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, or President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. They identify Superfund cleanup sites in Montana, road repairs in Acadia National Park in Maine, bridge replacements in Wisconsin, and almost anything else that received a cut of the $1.5 trillion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Officially, the signs exist to “advance the goals of accountability and transparency of Federal spending,” although unofficially, they were likely part of a push by the administration to promote Bidenomics, an effort that began in 2023. The signs follow strict design rules (that deep cerulean is specifically hex code #164484) and prescribed wording (Cincinnati officials got dinged for breaking the rules to add Kamala Harris’ name to signs ahead of the election), although whether to post them is technically at the discretion of local partners. But all federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Authority, which of each received millions in funding — were ordered by the Office of Management and Budget to post the signs “in an easily visible location that can be directly linked to the work taking place and must be maintained in good condition throughout the construction period.”
This has caused some irritation on the right, as you might imagine. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lodged a grievance with the Office of Special Counsel alleging Biden had violated the Hatch Act by using taxpayer dollars to pay for “nothing more than campaign yard signs.” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa gave her monthly “squeal award” to Biden in June for lack of transparency over how much the signs have cost and demanded disclosure from the OMB. (Signs erected to credit President Obama’s construction projects cost an estimated $300 million adjusted for inflation, though the Biden administration, likely aiming to skirt a similar scandal, specifies that the “signs should not be produced or displayed if doing so results in unreasonable cost, expense, or recipient burden.” Ernst’s office did not reply to a request from Heatmap about whether or not she ever got the numbers she was seeking from the OMB, and the White House never returned a request from Heatmap to supply the same.)
Democrats aren’t the only politicians who sign their names to their big accomplishments, however. Donald Trump took credit for COVID-19 stimulus checks, and George W. Bush’s Internal Revenue Service sent mailers to let the American people know who they could thank for their income tax refunds. But suppose America were to elect a president who happened to be especially petty and vindictive? In that case — this is, of course, hypothetical — would it be possible for the incoming president to order the removal of signs touting his predecessor’s achievements?
I ran the question by a Department of Transportation spokesperson, who told me such things are simply not done. “There has never been a request to remove project signs from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and we hope to see signage remain in communities for the lifecycle of BIL-funded projects,” the DOT spokesperson said.
Their answer implies that while such a thing would be unprecedented, it is also theoretically possible.
It’s unclear how many such signs there are, although the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has funded more than 66,000 projects, all of which are at least eligible for a sign. Whatever the exact number is, it’d be a big and expensive hassle to remove them all. Given that much of the IRA and BIL funding has already been allocated, as well, it seems like such a demand ought to be very low on an incoming president of the United States’ list of priorities.
At least, one would think.
The Trump administration is hoping to kill the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle buyers, according to a Reuters report citing two anonymous sources within the Trump transition team.
That aspiration isn’t totally unexpected — President-elect Donald Trump flirted with ending the EV tax credit throughout the campaign. But it’s nonetheless our first post-election sense of how the Trump administration plans to pursue the Republican tax package that is expected to be the centerpiece of its legislating agenda.
If the EV tax credit is repealed, it would deal a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles. General Motors, Ford, and other legacy automakers have invested billions of dollars to build EV factories and battery plants in order to prepare for an electric future. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the automaking industry’s trade group, has privately lobbied lawmakers to keep all of the Biden administration’s subsidies for EV production.
GM and Ford aren’t doing this just for the climate. They’re trying to compete with European and East Asian automakers that are transitioning to EVs — and will continue to transition, regardless of policy changes within the United States. BYD, the Chinese company that exclusively makes EVs, is on track this year to sell more cars globally than Ford. That’s the entire Ford line-up, not just EVs. China has reached its commanding position in the EV industry partly by offering EV consumers and companies more than $200 billion in subsidies, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The rollback would also be a setback for Tesla and Rivian, the two highest-profile American EV-only companies. Yet according to the same Reuters report, Tesla supports the plan to repeal the tax credit. Elon Musk has asserted in interviews that because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance. (As the country’s No. 1 EV seller, Tesla has also likely benefited from EV tax credits — in their current and pre-Biden forms — more than any other company.) Repeal is part of Musk’s hypothesized plan to turn Tesla into a de facto monopoly, controlling the entire American EV industry.
Rivian shares have fallen 11% today, while Tesla’s are down just 5%. Ford and GM are trading flat.
The new GOP majorities in Congress hope to extend their 2017 package of tax cuts, which mostly benefit wealthy Americans. One way to pay for those tax cuts could be to repeal the tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law. The news today, then, is mostly a sign that the battle lines are being drawn in the auto industry: Much of the auto industry wants to keep the full slate of EV subsidies. Tesla wants to take them down.