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On getting rid of legacy emissions, groundwater, and geoengineering
Current conditions: A large wildfire is burning out of control in northwestern Turkey • Intense storms killed at least 11 people in South Africa • It will be 109 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix today, and tomorrow will be hotter.
A team of international researchers this week published a new report on the state of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as it relates to global climate goals. The top-line takeaway is that CDR must quadruple if we want to stay in line with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. While stopping new greenhouse gas emissions is the top priority in curbing global warming, experts agree CDR will be needed to address legacy emissions, which can remain in the atmosphere for decades.
Current CDR efforts – from reforestation to direct air capture technology – remove about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. That’s far short of the 7-9 billion metric tons that will need to be removed annually by 2050. But the report’s authors say there are signs that CDR development is slowing down. They call for more investment to support the “high ambitions” of CDR companies, and want countries to weave CDR policies into their national climate action plans to spark demand and help CDR scale. Currently just 1.1% of investment in climate-tech startups goes toward CDR. In April, a report found that the U.S. will need to spend $100 billion per year by 2050 to make CDR a viable climate solution.
One really interesting insight from the report is that grant money is flowing steadily toward CDR research and development, especially in the U.S. and Canada: There were fewer than 50 third-party research grants for CDR in the year 2000, compared to 1,160 in 2022.
Somewhat relatedly, Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks yesterday unveiled new “generation 3” technology that it said can suck up twice as much carbon from the atmosphere using half the amount of energy as its previous designs.
A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience finds that the Earth’s groundwater is warming up due to climate change. For the study, researchers created a model to estimate changes in groundwater temperatures in varying global warming scenarios. Their model shows that by the end of the century, groundwater could be between 2.1 and 3.5 degrees Celsius (or between 3.8 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer on average than it is today. This would be bad news for ecosystems that rely on groundwater, as well as for humans: “As groundwater warms, there is increased risk of pathogen growth which impacts drinking water quality – potentially affecting the lives of many people,” said co-author Dr. Gabriel Rau of the University of Newcastle. The warming will vary by region, but parts of North America will see some of the most intense warming rates.
The world’s largest solar farm just came online. The 5-gigawatt, 200,000-acre farm is located in China’s Xinjiang region, and was officially connected to China’s grid on Monday. It’s one piece of China’s larger “megabase” initiative to install 455 GW of wind and solar. The new farm will generate about 6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year, making it “powerful enough to meet the electricity demands of a country the size of Luxembourg or Papua New Guinea,” as Anthony Cuthbertson at the Independent put it. The second- and third-largest solar farms (by capacity) are also located in China. A recent report from the International Energy Agency called China the world’s “renewable powerhouse” because it accounts for nearly 60% of the world’s new renewable capacity that will become operational by 2028.
Southern Germany has been absolutely hammered by torrential rain in recent days, resulting in overflowing rivers and deadly floods. Five people have died in the disaster. To give you a sense of how bad the situation is, more than a month’s worth of rain fell in the region between Friday and Monday, and water levels in the city of Passau rose by 32 feet. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reminded everyone that this kind of weather is not normal, saying that “we must not neglect the task of halting man-made climate change.”
Cleanup begins in a flooded town in Germany.Thomas Niedermueller/Getty Images
The rain is easing up now and some towns are starting their cleanup efforts, but all that water has to go somewhere, and BBC reports it’s headed down the Danube River into Austria, Hungary, and possibly Slovakia. Already the river burst its banks in the Austrian city of Linz, and Austria has halted all shipping activity in the river.
A first-of-its-kind geoengineering research project in California has been officially canceled. The research, conducted by a team from the University of Washington, involved spraying sea salt aerosol particles into the air using an instrument situated on a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Alameda, California. This process has been pitched as a way to brighten clouds and reflect the sun’s rays to cool the planet. Because studies on manipulating the climate are so controversial, the researchers kept the project on the downlow until it was up and running, and this lack of transparency – rather than any safety concerns – seems to have really rubbed city officials the wrong way. The Alameda City Council voted this morning to reject the experiment. “You didn’t start out on the right foot,” Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft told the researchers.
The dispute may be a little preview of things to come. “There’s a fair number of people who think there shouldn’t be research [on geoengineering], and these early experiments have become a proxy battleground for this larger question about how to think about the development of these technologies,” David Keith, director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago, toldThe Washington Post.
The Thomas Edison Birthplace Museum in Ohio is now powered by rooftop solar.
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On EV sales, a clean energy lobbying blitz, and fusion
Current conditions: Firefighters in South Korea are struggling to contain wildfires that have charred more than 36,000 acres • Reports of fire ant stings in Australia have exploded in recent weeks after torrential rain from Cyclone Alfred forced the invasive pests above ground • Temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, reached 96 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, breaking a daily heat record in place since 1990. Today is expected to be even hotter.
China’s BYD reported annual sales over $100 billion for the first time, dealing yet another blow to its chief U.S. rival, Tesla. The company’s shares have risen by 91% over the past 12 months. Tesla, by contrast, has yet to hit $100 billion in annual revenue, and its shares have dropped about 30% since the start of 2025, wiping out its post-election bump.
Tesla sales have been falling in some key markets in response to CEO Elon Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration and his meddling in European politics. In a poll provided to Heatmap last month, nearly half of likely U.S. voters said that Musk’s behavior had made them less likely to buy or lease a Tesla. As Bloomberg noted, BYD doesn’t sell in the U.S. due to tariffs on Chinese cars, “but it’s made big inroads into markets in Europe, places in Asia like Singapore and Thailand, as well as Australia.” On Sunday it rolled out its Qin L EV, which is a rival to Tesla’s Model 3 electric sedan, at half the price.
BYD
More than 100 clean energy companies, trade associations, and other industry stakeholders are descending on Capitol Hill this week to amplify an ongoing lobbying push to preserve clean energy tax credits in the upcoming budget reconciliation bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reports. Their mission? Convince Republicans on the House Ways and Means committee that the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act are key to executing President Trump’s energy agenda.
The Ways and Means Committee oversees tax writing, meaning that it will be responsible for proposing which of Trump’s tax cuts to include in the upcoming budget reconciliation bill, how to pay for them, and which of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits should stay or go. Although the Senate will also have a say, the signal in Washington right now is that whatever version of the bill the House passes is going to be pretty close to the final bill. “That’s why it’s so important for any Republican members who see the benefit of what’s happening in their communities and how their constituents are saving money on energy to be talking to their colleagues right now in Ways and Means,” said Andrew Reagan, the executive director of Clean Energy for America. Pontecorvo spoke with Reagan about this week’s lobbying push. Read their full conversation here.
Hyundai Motor Group announced on Monday it plans to build a $5.8 billion steel plant in Louisiana, part of a larger $21 billion investment in the South Korean automaker’s U.S.-based manufacturing operations. The company’s executives held a joint press conference at the White House to unveil the plans alongside President Trump and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry. The plant will produce 2.7 million tons of steel a year to be used to make Hyundai vehicles (and cars for its sister brands Kia and Genesis) at Hyundai plants in Alabama and Georgia. Other manufacturers may also use the steel.
Trump said the announcement was proof that his tariff threats work, but it’s also considered a boost for electric vehicles. The $21 billion investment includes money for projects to build more hybrids and EVs, EV batteries, and charging infrastructure in the U.S. Last year, Hyundai was America’s second best-selling EV maker. Tomorrow it will celebrate the recent opening of its new EV and battery plant in Georgia.
The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday it will not hear an appeal in a landmark youth-led climate case, putting an end to the 10-year legal battle. In Juliana v. United States, 21 young people sued the federal government, arguing it violated their constitutional rights by rolling out policies supporting fossil fuel usage. A lower court dismissed the suit in 2020, saying that the court system was not the right place to argue about climate change and that “the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government.” This case has served as a framework for other environmental lawsuits in recent years, some of them successful. A plaintiff in one of those cases saidJuliana had “left an indelible mark on the landscape of climate litigation.”
U.S.-based fusion power company Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced today it has started building its SPARC tokamak in Devens, Massachusetts. CFS says that by 2027, its SPARC tokamak will be “the world’s first commercially relevant fusion energy machine to produce more energy from fusion than it needs to power the process.” This month the company installed the tokamak’s cryostat base, which will help to keep the system’s magnets cool. With assembly of SPARC underway, “we can now see the beginnings of the actual machine we’ll use to prove the commercial viability of our technology,” the company said in a press release.
Researchers in Europe have developed a highly-efficient transparent solar cell that could pave the way for solar windows.
The fight to preserve the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits begins in earnest this week.
More than 100 clean energy companies, trade associations, and other industry stakeholders are descending on Capitol Hill this week to amplify an ongoing lobbying push to preserve clean energy tax credits in the upcoming budget reconciliation bill. Groups such as Clean Energy for America, the Solar Energy Industries Association, and the Carbon Capture Coalition will be making their case alongside battery storage companies like Enphase, investors from CleanCapital, utility-scale wind and solar developers, small residential solar installers, and customers that have benefited, including school superintendents.
Their mission? Convince Republicans on the House Ways and Means committee that the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act are key to executing President Trump’s energy agenda.
The Ways and Means Committee oversees tax writing, meaning that it will be responsible for proposing which of Trump’s tax cuts to include in the upcoming budget reconciliation bill, how to pay for them, and which of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits should stay or go. “That is where these decisions are being talked about behind closed doors,” Andrew Reagan, the executive director of Clean Energy for America, told me.
Although the Senate will also have a say, Reagan said that the signal in Washington right now is that whatever version of the bill the House passes is going to be pretty close to the final bill. “That’s why it’s so important for any Republican members who see the benefit of what’s happening in their communities and how their constituents are saving money on energy to be talking to their colleagues right now in Ways and Means.”
I talked to Reagan more about what the lobbying push this week will look like. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
First off, why is this push happening now? What’s going on this week?
Folks both in clean energy businesses and in trade associations have been meeting with Hill offices on an almost daily basis throughout this year to highlight the negative impacts that would happen if these priority energy tax credits are not preserved. What’s unique here is Congress is back in session, and we have the process moving in Ways and Means. And as Speaker Johnson and others have signaled, the House version is what they expect will be the final version of a reconciliation bill. So the time to preserve these energy tax credits is now.
Which tax credits are your priority? Is it a push for everything, or is it a push for specific policies?
We want to be a voice for both the clean energy workforce and companies in this industry. The unifying message is we need policy stability, and if we’re going to achieve the energy goals that the Trump administration has laid out, we can’t do that by repealing or curtailing many of the critical energy credits. There is a lot of importance on both 45X, clean manufacturing, and 48E and 45Y, the tech neutral [clean electricity production and investment] credits because that has such a broad effect across the entire industry, across the entire economy. They are going to be pivotal to continuing to lower energy costs and create jobs.
I don’t want to give short shrift to a lot of the others that are creating innovation. I’m not sure if you saw the Jesse Jenkins study recently, but things like 30D, the consumer EV credit — he projected that has a big impact on 45X. So I think it’s also important to educate folks that there is a real risk. Even if you keep a credit in place, if you take away too much of the underlying reinforcement in related credits, you can see these really negative effects where it might be the same as effectively killing or curtailing some of those credits.
Other than making the jobs argument and the consumer savings argument, what is your message for Republicans?
One of the really important but maybe underappreciated points is that if you take away many of these credits, you will see electricity prices across the board, both for consumers and for industry, rise. There’s a study that [the Clean Energy Buyers Association] put out that gave a state by state projection of how much energy costs would rise just by next year, just if the 48E and 45Y production and investment credits were taken out. In some cases, in some states, that’s an increase of anywhere from up to 6% or 10% on top of existing inflation. So I think when we’re talking to Republican offices and Democratic offices, the case that we’re making is, “You want to lower costs for consumers? The existing tax credits that are helping more energy be produced are pivotal to doing that.”
And then, to come back to the parts of President Trump’s energy agenda that I think we all can get behind, things like bringing back manufacturing to the United States — manufacturing uses an immense amount of energy, so rising electricity prices for commercial applications make it harder to manufacture. As well as the president’s promise to lower energy bills by half in 12 to 18 months — there’s no way to achieve that goal if you curtail or drastically cut the energy tax credit.
So I think it’s important to really link for offices, if you are a Republican who wants to see President Trump’s energy agenda succeed, all of those things are reliant upon the existing energy credits. This is not a choice of, do they need to go against the president? This is something where they can still help their consumers, advance the parts of the president’s agenda that are related to energy, and they don’t have to make that choice.
Are you pushing for blanket protection for some of these tax credits? Or are you talking through potential compromises that legislators can make while still preserving the biggest benefits?
Clean Energy for America and the companies we work with, we’ve really just focused on education and the broader picture. I’ve been astounded by how many offices didn’t even know about some of the big projects in their district that were benefiting from tax credits. So I think there’s a lot more education needed about some of the very basics at this point. There are others with much more policy expertise equipped to get into some of those conversations. But again, at Clean Energy for America, our focus has been, here are all the benefits being created in your district, in your state, and backing that up with the data and the real voices of both companies and workers.
What does the fight to save the IRA on the Hill look like? Who are the main players to convince?
The first thing I would say is, the framing of “saving the IRA” — that’s not how we, or I think anyone else, thinks about it. A lot of the credits that we’re talking about predated the IRA, and so we really try to move the conversation on to, here are the pieces of these tax credits that both existed before and are currently benefiting your district. Mike Fitzpatrick on Ways and Means, he was instrumental in 2020 on some of the [investment tax credit] provisions.
We published a story this morning about the tough budget math that’s going to make it a lot harder to preserve the IRA. How is that playing into this lobbying push?
One thing I would say is, without getting too far in the weeds, I think the debate around “current policy baseline,” for how the tax package is paid for, is going to be probably the single most important thing. Even if you repealed all of the things we’re talking about, there’s no way to advance what the president wants in a tax package out of the House without a current policy baseline framework. So I think that is probably, even more so than the math of the current credits, going to be the pivotal piece of this larger policy.
Does that mean that you support a current policy baseline?
We have not advocated specifically, publicly on that issue. I’m just speaking from a process standpoint, that I would be very surprised if there’s a way that Republicans can get something out of the House if they don’t implement that current policy baseline.
On the IEA’s latest report, wildfires in North Carolina, and EV adoption
Current conditions: A wildfire in New Jersey’s Wharton State Forest has burned 2,300 acres • An ancient Roman bridge collapsed in central Spain after extreme rainfall from four consecutive storms • Los Angeles could see record-breaking March heat today with temperatures nearing 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
The ballooning price tag of President Trump’s tax cut wishlist and preliminary budget negotiations on the Hill are pointing toward a budgetary showdown in which many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s benefits could become fiscal casualties. D.C. veterans, including former GOP Hill staff, tell Heatmap that even the most bipartisan parts of the IRA could be sacrificed in the budget reconciliation process in order to make room for Trump’s biggest legislative priorities, including extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security, and removing the cap on the state and local tax liability deductions.
The Congressional Budget Office, as well as third-party groups like the Tax Foundation and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, have estimated that an extension of the 2017 tax cuts would cost between $3.7 and $4.5 trillion through 2034. If all of Trump’s additional proposed tax cuts were enacted, the cost would jump to $6.8 trillion, according to Penn Wharton. Congress is still at the beginning of the reconciliation process. The next step is for the House and Senate to negotiate a topline number and issue instructions to the committees that will write the final bill on the levels of spending they’re allowed to include.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo and Jael Holzman explain, the dollar amount assigned to each committee is a ceiling, and it’s calculated on a net basis. So if the Ways and Means committee, which oversees tax legislation, is assigned a $4.5 trillion deficit ceiling, as it was in the version of the reconciliation instructions that recently passed the House, it’s going to have to find several trillion dollars worth of spending programs to cut. Fully repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits — which, according to new modeling from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, would raise about $850 billion — will start to look harder to avoid.
Major wildfires erupted in the Carolinas over the weekend, burning more than 4,000 acres and threatening some areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Helene six months ago. Debris from hurricanes makes already battered areas more vulnerable to fires, Colleen Hagerty wrote for Heatmap in the aftermath of Helene. And as Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote more recently, researchers are pointing to the South as a new area of wildfire concern.
South Carolina’s governor declared a state of emergency Saturday as the Table Rock fire spread to cover 300 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, prompting evacuations. In North Carolina, several large fires are raging out of control in Polk County, southeast of Ashville, where last year’s Hurricane Helene brought devastating floods and debris. Much of Polk County is enduring drought conditions. High winds, dry vegetation, and low humidity are fueling the fires, but response efforts are also hampered by steep terrain and hurricane debris that has yet to be cleared. Mandatory evacuations were in effect for some parts of Polk County.
A home destroyed in a fire in North Carolina.Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Global energy demand rose by 2.2% last year, faster than the average pace seen over the past decade or so, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review 2025 report. The rise was led mostly by the power sector as record warmth meant greater need for air conditioning, especially in emerging and developing countries. “Nearly all of the rise in electricity demand was met by low-emissions sources,” the report said, with renewables and nuclear providing 80% of the growth in global electricity generation. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose last year (by 0.8%) but at a slower rate than in 2023. “The global increase of 300 million tonnes of CO2 was influenced by record high temperatures,” the report said. “If weather in 2024 had remained consistent with 2023, itself the second-hottest year on record, about half of the increase in global emissions would have been avoided.”
In case you missed it: We now know which grants the Environmental Protection Agency has canceled. A document the EPA shared with the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives. Here’s the full list of grants, by program.
A new study finds that political views remain a key factor in determining whether someone chooses to buy an electric vehicle. The report, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined new EV registration data at a county level between 2012 and 2023 and found that during those years, the scale of the EV market expanded, yet nearly half of all sales were in the 10% most Democratic counties. Researchers controlled for other factors, such as income and gas prices, and still, the strong correlation between political ideology and EV adoption remains. And it hasn’t decreased over time. “We find little evidence that the U.S. EV market has broadened across the political spectrum from 2012 to 2023,” the researchers say. There were some exceptions, though: EV trucks and vans are “significantly less concentrated” in left-leaning counties compared to electric cars and SUVs.
California now has nearly 50% more EV chargers than it does gas pumps. According to the California Energy Commission, there are roughly 178,000 EV chargers in the state, compared with approximately 120,000 gas nozzles.