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Wow, It’s Hot in D.C.

And last week we had snow. What a world.

Robinson Meyer •
01/26/2024
The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The temperature rose to 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, D.C. today. That is weird because it’s currently January 26, and because about four inches of snow fell last week. (Literally, D.C. public schools had a snow day a week ago.) Now the snow has melted and people are walking around in shorts and t-shirts.

While it can be hard to attribute individual weather events to climate change, “freakishly warm winter days” are an exception. Washington’s winters have gotten significantly warmer lately because of climate change. Across the country, climate change is making winters warmer and less snowy.

As a Washingtonian, I’ll add that these warmer days are especially odd because the sun is still at a slanty January angle. At 2 p.m. the sun was less than 30 degrees above the horizon; that’s the same height it would be at, say, 5 or 6 p.m. in June or July. So it looks and feels like a cool summer evening here — but it’s actually a bright winter early afternoon. Global weirding is right.

Green
Robinson Meyer profile image

Robinson Meyer

Robinson is the founding executive editor of Heatmap. He was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, energy, and technology.

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Sparks

Major Renewables Nonprofit Cuts a Third of Staff After Trump Slashes Funding

The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.

Jael Holzman •
10/17/2025
The DOE wrecking ball.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.

IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)

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Sparks

Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled, BLM Says

It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.

Jael Holzman •
10/09/2025
Donald Trump, Doug Burgum, and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.

Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.

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Sparks

Trump Just Suffered His First Loss on Offshore Wind

A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.

Jael Holzman •
09/22/2025
Donald Trump and wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.

The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”

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