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Well That Was a Very Distressing Presidential Debate
Current conditions: Forecasters are keeping an eye on a weather system moving toward the Caribbean that could strengthen into a tropical storm • Heavy rains have rejuvenated dried-up lakes and lagoons in Chile • Severe storms could bring strong wind, excessive rain, and hail to parts of Europe over the next few days. THE TOP FIVE1. Biden squanders his climate moment at presidential debate Well, last night’s first 2024 debate between President Biden and Donald Trump was “altogether distressing,” writes Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. And while climate was far from the main focus, the two candidates did have one notable exchange. Trump...
Biden Had His Climate Moment and He Used It to Talk About Paris
In an altogether distressing debate in which climate was far from a main focus, the two candidates did have one notable exchange regarding the Paris Agreement. The 2015 treaty united most countries around the world in setting a goal to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, with 1.5 degrees as the ultimate target.After Trump initially dodged a question about whether he would take action to slow the climate crisis, he then briefly noted “I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air. And we had it. We had H2O.”While it is true that...
What Were Trump’s ‘Environmental Numbers,’ Actually?
Former President Donald Trump has been known, on occasion, to exaggerate. Still, an assertion he made during the first presidential debate on Thursday night is one for the books: “During my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever,” he said.It was “unclear” what Trump was “talking about,” The New York Times diplomatically said. But Thursday was hardly the first time Trump has claimed to be “the number one” environmentalist president. He’s said that the “environment is very important to me” and that “I’m a big believer in that word: the environment.” And for proof, he’s historically pointed...
Will This Be the Hottest Presidential Debate Ever?
In spite of a deadly heat wave that has seen temperatures touch 100 degrees Fahrenheit and a first-ever summer date, today’s presidential debate in Atlanta won’t even come close to being the hottest ever. Temperatures will reach 84 degrees this afternoon and are forecasted to settle around 80 degrees by the time the debate begins at 9 p.m. Eastern. This is the first presidential debate not to be held in September or October, when most American cities have started to cool down. And of the cities that have hosted debates, just four are further south Atlanta. Yet this is just...
FERC Says Yes to the LNG Terminal
The Department of Energy may not be ready to say yes to more liquified natural gas export projects, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is. In a meeting on Thursday, FERC approved plans for a massive LNG terminal project in Louisiana by a 2-1 vote, with Allison Clements, an outgoing Democratic commissioner, as the lone dissenter.The Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, project would install some 20 million metric tons of export capacity in a hurricane-battered coastal Louisiana community near the Texas border. You may have heard of it if you followed the drama in January around the Biden administration’s...
Carbon Removal’s Existential Question
Carbon removal would seem to have a pretty clear definition. It’s the reverse of carbon emissions. It means taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it somewhere else — underground, into products, into the ocean — where it won’t warm the planet. But a new kind of carbon removal project shows how this formula can conceal consequential differences between approaches.A few months ago, Puro.earth, a carbon removal registry, certified a small ethanol refinery in North Dakota to sell carbon removal credits — the first ethanol plant to earn this privilege. Red Trail Energy, which owns the facility, captures...
Who Will Bring Up Climate at the First Presidential Debate?
Current conditions: Severe storms dropped hail stones on Madrid • More than 500 people have died during a heat wave in Pakistan • A home near Minnesota’s failing Rapidan Dam was swept into the raging Blue Earth River.THE TOP FIVE1. Biden and Trump to debate in AtlantaPresident Biden and former President Donald Trump will meet in Atlanta tonight for the first presidential debate of 2024. The head-to-head comes as millions of Americans endure extreme weather events – from dangerous heat waves to wildfires to unprecedented flooding – made worse by climate change and our use of fossil fuels. If...
The Climate Tech Accelerator with a Football Team
Backed by a whopping $1.69 billion endowment, Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability — its first new school in more than 70 years — opened its doors two years ago, and what else came along with it but a new sustainability-focused accelerator specifically for the Stanford community. Seeking to move research out of the lab and into the real world, the Sustainability Accelerator provides early stage funding and a deep network of university-affiliated support to its grantees. Now that the accelerator has staffed up, gathered insights from its first funding cohort, and given more structure to what is still a...
The Coolest Thing in Climate Tech Just Got More Buyers
Rondo Energy, a Silicon Valley startup building “heat batteries” to replace fossil fuels in heavy industries, announced three new customers on Wednesday. In just a few months' time, the company has gone from serving a single industry — ethanol — at its pilot plant in California, to making deals around the globe that demonstrate the technology’s potential versatility. With grant funding from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, as well as the European Investment Bank, the company will install three commercial-scale batteries at factories in Denmark, Germany, and Portugal. Each one will prove Rondo's compatibility with a different industry: In Denmark, the...
Utah Is Sending a Conservative Climate Believer to the Senate
The United States Senate is almost certainly getting another Republican who at least thinks climate change is a real problem. Utah Congressman John Curtis, the founder of the Conservative Climate Caucus, won the Republican primary for Mitt Romney’s Senate seat over a gaggle of more conservative opponents, including one endorsed by former president Donald Trump. The primary victory puts Curtis in position to win the general election in November. (Utah hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1970.) His victory was fueled in part by conservative environmental groups and donors, who put considerable resources toward his campaign. American Conservation Coalition...
Why VW and Rivian are Teaming Up
Current conditions: Puerto Rico issued a heat advisory for the entire island for the first time ever • Flooding and landslides in Ivory Coast left at least 24 people dead • A fast-growing wildfire in central Oregon prompted evacuations. THE TOP FIVE1. Volkswagen and Rivian team up in $5 billion joint venture Volkswagen announced it will invest $5 billion ($1 billion now, another $4 billion over a few years) in EV pickup company Rivian as part of a joint venture “to create next generation software-defined vehicle (SDV) platforms to be used in both companies’ future electric vehicles.” The move will give...
America’s Nuclear Policy Is Getting … Pretty Good!
Congress just passed perhaps its biggest support for zero-carbon energy since the Inflation Reduction Act. The ADVANCE Act, which the Senate adopted overwhelmingly last week, aims to keep America at the cutting edge of the global nuclear industry by cutting regulatory fees, making it easier for U.S. companies to build nuclear power plants abroad, and reforming the agency that oversees it all, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Ryan Norman, a senior policy advisor at Third Way’s climate and energy program, about how America got here. We talk about why...
The First Crack Just Opened in the Climate Left
There will be many chances this week to dissect why two-term New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost his primary to Westchester County Executive George Latimer, which The Associated Press called less than an hour after the polls closed on Tuesday. Post mortems will focus on the financial angle (the 16th District primary was the most expensive in House history) and, of course, the Israel-Palestine angle (nearly $15 million alone came from an American Israel Public Affairs Committee-affiliated super PAC that aggressively portrayed Bowman as antisemitic). Others will say it had been a forgone conclusion and point to the disturbing...
The Case for EVs With Gas Tanks
The American car buyer is a hard one to satisfy. The freedom of the open road is embedded in our consciousness in a way it is in few (if any) other countries. A typical American consumer may want to be able to embark on a summer road-trip across the United States’ vast distances, to cram in a family of five and all their camping supplies (and maybe a dog and a canoe!), or to hitch up a trailer to haul a boat or RV wherever they might want to adventure. We may not use all those features most of...
Fires, Floods, and Federal Court
Current conditions: Deadly flooding in parts of the Midwest is forecast to worsen Tuesday before rivers crest midweek • Northern China remains in drought as the southern province of Guangdong suffers flooding, landslides, and mudslides • Western India braces for heavy rains. THE TOP FIVE1. SCOTUS takes on NEPAThe U.S. Supreme Court is due to close out its latest session this week (although decisions could stretch into July), and court- and climate-watchers are expecting it to issue a death blow to a legal precedent called the Chevron deference, which gave federal agencies wide latitude to interpret their mandates where the...
Why Cooling Centers Were Closed Last Week
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...
Everyone Wants Nuclear Now
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has become something of a one-woman band lately, traveling the country promoting nuclear energy. In Las Vegas at the American Nuclear Society annual conference last week, she told the audience, “We’re looking at a chance to build new nuclear at a scale not seen since the ’70s and ’80s.” A few weeks earlier she paid a visit to the Vogtle nuclear plant outside of Augusta, Georgia, site of the first new nuclear project to start construction this century “It’s time to cash in on our investments by building more, more of these facilities,” she...
A New Coalition Is Pushing Governments to Make More Ambitious Climate Plans
Excessive rainfall in the Swiss Alps triggered a landslide • Power was restored in the Balkans following a massive outage that left people sweltering • Flood waters are receding in Rock Valley, Iowa, after 1,500 people were forced to evacuate.THE TOP FIVE1. ‘Mission 2025’ coalition launches to encourage governments to improve climate plansA group of influential leaders across business and politics have formed a new coalition, called Mission 2025, aimed at pressuring governments to “align their upcoming national climate plans with the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.” These plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs),...
Heirloom Is Moving a Giant DAC Project to Shreveport
Northwest Louisiana is about to be awash in direct air capture. Heirloom announced today that it’s moving its half of the Department of Energy-funded Project Cypress DAC hub from coastal Calcasieu Parish inland to Shreveport — and that it will be building a second facility, capable of removing 17,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, on the same site. Once the two facilities reach full scale, they will have the capacity to suck up a combined 317,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.Project Cypress, one of two regional DAC hubs that’s been announced thus far, is a partnership between...
What Are All These Ground-Level Ozone Alerts?
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the hole in the ozone layer. Like Joseph Kony and Livestrong wristbands, the obsession over O3 now feels like a cultural artifact, thanks to ozone depletion being one of the rare success stories of international environmental cooperation. Since the world banned chlorofluorocarbons under the Montreal Protocol in 1987, the holes over the North and South poles have steadily recovered.Today, if you hear about “ozone” at all, it’s much more likely to be from an air quality alert on your phone. Unlike the stratospheric ozone that we were all so concerned...
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