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Culture

Welcome to Heatmap

We hope to do climate coverage a little differently.

Climate change and clean energy.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Let us tell you a story about a force that’s reshaping everything you care about. It’s a story of parched earth and rising tides, great power rivalries and massive infrastructure projects, the food we eat and the homes we build, ultra-fast cars and the richest man in the world. It’s the story of climate change, and it’s what we’re focused on here at Heatmap.

I started Heatmap because I wanted to read it. I was hungry to discover the details, nuances, and hard choices of climate change, because that’s where the most interesting and important parts of any story lie. I wanted stories that go beyond the basics and approach the topic as the all-encompassing epic it is.

After all, think of how many important stories had climate change or energy at their center over the past year. There’s President Biden’s climate legislation, his biggest accomplishment to date. There’s the war in Ukraine, which is being waged by a petro-state and has sent the world hurtling towards decarbonization. There’s inflation, driven by fossil fuels and energy shortages. In Silicon Valley, venture funding is pouring into climate tech at a record clip and the world’s digital public square was recently acquired by an erratic electric vehicle mogul. Meanwhile on Apple TV next week, a climate show premieres starring Edward Norton, Meryl Streep, Kit Harington, and Diane Lane.

There’s a lot to cover.

Heatmap is made up of an incredible group of journalists and media veterans who are interested in telling the same stories and diving into the same details as I am. Some of us come to Heatmap with deep climate expertise. Others come fresh to the topic from relevant backgrounds, like politics or economics or culture. (I come from The Week, where I dabbled in a bit of everything.)

All of us are grateful for you reading us today as we get started. If you enjoy what you read, I hope you’ll consider supporting our work with a subscription so we can continue to pursue this fascinating, vital story in all its detail.

Thank you,

Nico Lauricella
Founder and editor in chief

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Politics

Here Are the Grants EPA Canceled

The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.

The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.

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The New Campaign to Save Renewables: Lower Electricity Bills

Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.

A leaf and a quarter.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.

The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”

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AM Briefing: A Letter from EPA Staff

On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits

EPA Workers Wrote an Anonymous Letter to America
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.

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1. Trump issues executive order to expand critical mineral output

President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”

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