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The Messy Truth of America’s Natural Gas Exports
Late last month, Joe Biden made what has been hailed as one of the biggest climate policy decisions of the past year. He announced that the federal government would temporarily stop approving new export terminals for liquified natural gas. The move was celebrated as a victory by climate activists and lamented by fossil-fuel companies; Donald Trump promised that, if elected, he will reverse the move. But what will the pause really mean for the climate? Will it stop exports from rising in the near-term, and can we say with any certainty whether it will make carbon emissions go up or down?...
It’s a Big Week for Carbon Removal
Current conditions: Winter storm warnings are in effect across parts of the American Southwest • Huge waves washed jellyfish onto the streets of Havana • It’s snowy and cold in Tokyo, where Taylor Swift is kicking off the second leg of her Eras Tour. THE TOP FIVE1. ‘World’s largest carbon removal plant’ will soon be up and running One to watch for this week: A Bill Gates-backed startup called Graphyte plans to begin operations at its Arkansas carbon removal plant by Friday, E&E News reported. The facility, which has been dubbed the “world’s largest carbon removal plant,” relies on biomass matter...
Republicans Are Doing Ideological Loop-the-Loops Over LNG
On Tuesday, North Dakota Republican Kelly Armstrong insisted Congress needs to put actual muscle behind all its talk of environmental justice. Freedom Caucus member Debbie Lesko of Arizona made an argument for reducing worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. South Carolina’s Jeff Duncan, who has repeatedly voted against economic assistance for Ukraine, made the case that the United States is all that stands between Kyiv and Putin. Confused? Dizzy? Disoriented? I can hardly blame you. This, unfortunately, is all part of the Republican Party’s fossil fuel defense strategy. In the first of two hearings on the Hill this week concerning the White House’s...
I Was Wrong About Plug-in Hybrids
When my sister’s long-lived Scion met a sudden, destructive end last month, she was ready to take the leap into electric. She tried one plug-in hybrid she could find in Topeka, Kansas — an old Chevy Volt — before rejecting it in favor of a gently used Nissan Leaf.Across town, my parents had been car-shopping, too. And while they thought about a plug-in hybrid as a way to dip their toes into electrification, they found only one on the nearby lots — a used car the dealer tried to sell above MSRP because, well, they could. Mom and dad...
The California Storm’s Massive Bill
Current conditions: More than a foot of snow fell in the Sierra mountains • It’s 47 degrees Fahrenheit on Italy’s Mount Terminillo, where a popular ski resort is closed due to lack of snow • January was the 9th straight warmest month on record.THE TOP FIVE1. California storm causes $11 billion in damageThe storm that dropped huge amounts of rain on Southern California Sunday and Monday caused at least $11 billion in damages and economic losses, according to Accuweather. Dangerous winds, flooding, and landslides pummeled the region, hitting Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods particularly hard. The University of...
How Google Maps Is (Subtly!) Trying to Persuade You to Make Better Choices
While browsing Google Flights for an escape from the winter doldrums, I recently encountered a notification I hadn’t seen before. One particular return flight from Phoenix to New York was highlighted in light green as avoiding “as much CO2 as 1,400 trees absorb a day.”I’d seen Google Flights’ emissions estimates before, of course — they’ve been around since 2021 — but this was the first time I’d seen it translate a number like “265 kg CO2e” into something I could actually understand. Suddenly, not picking the flight felt like it would have made me, well, kind of bad.Yael Maguire,...
Introducing Shift Key, a New Climate Podcast from Heatmap News
I have some exciting news this morning: Heatmap is launching its first podcast. It’s called Shift Key, and it’s hosted by me and Professor Jesse Jenkins, an expert on energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Here’s the idea of Shift Key: It’s going to be like listening in on a call between Jesse and me every week. We want to bring you the most interesting conversation about climate change and decarbonization that you’ll hear each week. Follow us right now at Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. You’ve almost certainly seen Jesse’s work on Heatmap or heard him on another podcast before. He’s one...
Paris Is Waging War on SUVs
Current conditions: Wildfires have killed at least 110 people in Chile • Large parts of Australia are bracing for another sweltering heat wave • Severe snow is disrupting travel in China ahead of this weekend's Lunar New Year holiday. THE TOP FIVE1. Atmospheric river drenches CaliforniaA powerful atmospheric river is slamming Southern California, bringing record-breaking rainfall, high winds, severe flooding, and mudslides. Flash flood warnings were issued for Los Angeles and surrounding counties, where rivers swelled and streets were submerged. Officials called the event "one of the most dramatic weather days in recent memory." More than 550,000 customers were without...
How Bad Is LNG for the Climate, Really?
President Biden’s decision to pause approving liquified natural gas export terminals until it can better study their climate effects — functionally delaying or even outright preventing their construction — got real political, real fast. Almost immediately, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin called for a hearing on the president’s decision-making. “If the Administration has the facts to prove that additional LNG export capacity would hurt Americans, they must make that information public and clear,” he said in a statement last week. “But if this pause is just another political ploy to pander to keep-it-in-the-ground climate activists at the expense of American...
We Have Learned Nothing in the Year Since East Palestine
This time last year, the 151 cars of Norfolk Southern train 32N were still rolling along somewhere between Madison, Illinois, and Ohio’s eastern border. The train had suffered a brief breakdown on its northeast journey to Toledo, where a new crew came on before the double locomotives turned southeast, following the shore of Lake Erie into Cleveland, a metropolitan area of 2.18 million residents. It’d have been an irritating train to encounter at a railroad crossing: It stretched almost two miles long. 32N also weighed 18,000 tons, and in its 20 hazardous material tank cars, it carried some 700,000...
Big Oil Is Doing Great ... Except in California
It was a good 2023 for Big Oil. In most places.Both Exxon and Chevron reported substantial fourth quarter and full-year 2023 earnings Friday — $36 billion and $21 billion for 2023, respectively, their second highest annual profits ever. Both also called out California, however, once one of the cradles of the U.S. oil industry (see: There Will Be Blood) and now its biggest domestic political headache as a place where they’re enduring billions in losses.While the two oil majors’ issues in California are specific to how they operate there, they are also perhaps a preview — or a warning...
Volvo and Polestar Break Up
Current conditions: “The largest storm of the season” is scheduled to make landfall tomorrow in California, which is fresh off one storm that dumped water across the state. The Spanish region of Catalonia has declared a state of emergency over its worst drought on record. Residents are protesting unprecedented water shortages in Mexico City, which is struggling after years of little rain. THE TOP FIVE 1. Volvo splits with Polestar Yesterday, Swedish automaker Volvo announced it is pulling funding from Polestar, its EV arm, which has struggled to gain a foothold in the market. As Jennifer Mossalgue reports in Electrek, Polestar is...
Crypto Mining Consumes a Mind-Boggling 2% of U.S. Electricity
Just how much electricity does cryptocurrency mining use? It could be over 2% of all electricity in the United States, according to a preliminary estimate released by the Energy Information Administration. More specifically, “annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.”Using data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance on Bitcoin, specifically, the EIA estimated that, at least as of January 2022, almost 38% of all Bitcoin mining was occurring in the U.S., which let it produce a range of estimates for Bitcoin mining’s electricity usage, ranging from 25 terawatt-hours to...
Why This Copper-Nickel Mine Has Been Delayed for Nearly 20 Years
In northeastern Minnesota, a fight over the proposed NewRange Copper Nickel mine, better known as PolyMet, has dragged on for nearly two decades. Permits have been issued and revoked; state and federal agencies have been sued. The argument at the heart of the saga is familiar: Whether the pollution and disruption the mine will create are worth it for the jobs and minerals that it will produce. The arguments are so familiar, in fact, that one wonders why we haven’t come up with a permitting and approval process that accounts for them. In total, the $1 billion NewRange project...
GM Announces the Return of the Hybrids
Current conditions: The city of Oakland, California opened two emergency shelters for unhoused residents ahead of storms that brought the threat of floods to the state • Dense fog is disrupting flights and trains in Delhi, which is experiencing its coldest January in 13 years • A heat wave in Australia, where it’s currently the summer, is breaking temperature records. THE TOP FIVE 1. Podesta to become new climate envoy Senior Biden advisor John Podesta will take over from former Secretary of State John Kerry as the U.S. special envoy for climate change, the White House announced. Kerry, who’s stepping down this...
The New Climate Laws’ Tax Credits for Homeowners Are Crazy Powerful
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — are together filled with dozens of financial incentives to help regular Americans switch to clean technologies. The IRA, in particular, is the largest investment in confronting climate change the country has ever made. That work is happening, in no small part, on the (literal) home front. A new study published in the journal Energy Policy authored by researchers from Vanderbilt University, shows that while only about 12% of climate and energy funds in the IRA and 5.7% in the...
‘We’re Not Going to Take a Victory Lap’: The People on the Front Lines of the LNG Fight
On paper, the names look like a roster of nursing home residents: Rita and Katrina, Ike and Gustav, Harvey and Laura and Delta. “I mean, literally, those are all hurricanes since 2005,” James Hiatt, the founder of the environmental justice organization For a Better Bayou, told me. “The storm that hit southwest Louisiana before that was Hurricane Audrey in 1957. So before 2005, we’d gone 50 years without really any storm.” Now, though, few American communities are more obviously in the crosshairs of climate change than Louisiana’s Cameron Parish. It’s not just the influx of supercharged storms, which have repeatedly wiped...
Climate Tech for Disaster Relief
Current conditions: Millions of people on the West Coast are under flood alerts as two atmospheric rivers are set to hit the region, bringing torrential rains but also the possibility of critical snowpack replenishment • The Colombian president declared a national disaster as firefighters struggle to put out wildfires in the mountains around Bogotá • Forecasters in the UK are warning of the chance of tornadoes as 85 mile per hour winds batter the country. THE TOP FIVE 1. FEMA will cover solar panels and other clean tech after disasters Yesterday the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, announced that it will...
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