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The Last Gasp of Winter Sports
On January 15, as the first major winter storm of the season screeched across the U.S., Minneapolis’ Theodore Wirth Regional Park remained cold, hard, and — most stubbornly — brown. “We continue to be denied any measurable amount of snow,” read the park’s trail report for the day. “Frozen dandruff-covered dirt is our destiny for the time being.” In a few weeks, over Presidents Day weekend, the park is scheduled to host the United States’ first cross country skiing World Cup in more than 20 years. For an event like that, “dandruff-covered dirt” simply will not cut it. “We’re really...
It’s 2030. Where Will U.S. Carbon Emissions Come From?
The year is 2030. For much of the past decade, the United States has taken aggressive action to fight climate change. After passing the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration regulated carbon pollution from power plants and cars and trucks. (Let’s also stipulate, for the sake of argument, that it kept the rules in place by winning re-election in 2024.) Progressive states such as California, New York, and Illinois responded by passing even tougher climate laws of their own. And now, at the end of the decade, America has a good shot of hitting its Paris Agreement goal...
Carbon Offsets From Clean Cookstoves Are Kind of Bogus, Too
A new study casts doubt on the integrity of yet another type of carbon offset.Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, investigated clean cookstove projects, in which companies distribute stoves that require less or cleaner types of fuel to people who cannot afford them and sell carbon credits based on the resulting emission reductions. These projects have generated, on average, nine times more carbon credits than they should have based on their climate benefits, the researchers found. This kind of credit inflation obscures climate progress, as the individuals and businesses who buy these credits do so to justify their...
San Diego Got a Month's Worth of Rain in 3 Hours
Current conditions: Wildfires are raging around the Colombian capital of Bogotá • Storm Isha is moving away from the U.K., but Storm Jocelyn is approaching • It’s 35 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy in New Hampshire, where voters will head to the polls in the first presidential primary of 2024. THE TOP FIVE 1. Extreme rainfall floods San Diego San Diego’s mayor declared a state of emergency Monday after the city experienced its wettest January day on record. More than a month’s worth of rain fell in just three hours, flooding streets, washing away cars, and inundating homes. “The whole house is,...
Wall Street Loves Tesla for Its AI and Its Robots — Not for Its Cars
What makes Tesla, the world’s leading automaker by market cap, so valuable? The obvious answer would be that it sells hundreds of thousands of cars every quarter, for which it can command a tidy premium because of how much the Tesla name is worth. When it rolls out something new — no matter how odd-looking — Tesla fans are willing to put up money for the right to order a vehicle years later. As many of the world’s biggest economies try to transition away from internal combustion, Tesla is as well positioned as anyone to benefit immensely. But according...
Transit Agencies Are Climate Agencies, Too
Last September, Jeanie Ward-Waller, a deputy director at California’s state transportation department, was called into her supervisor’s office and told she was being removed from her role, no explanation given. But Ward-Waller thinks she knows what happened.A few weeks earlier, she’d threatened to blow the whistle on the agency for a highway repaving project that she believed was covertly — and illegally — going to widen the road. Under state law, highway expansions require environmental review and public input. It was also exactly the kind of project the agency was supposedly moving away from, according to its climate action...
Exxon's War on Activist Investors
Current conditions: An ice storm has snarled traffic in parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma • Rescue teams are working in freezing temperatures to rescue victims of a landslide in China • Half of Australia's states are under heat warnings.THE TOP FIVE1. Storm Isha slams UK and Europe with hurricane-force windsStorm Isha battered the United Kingdom and parts of Europe with hurricane-force winds and heavy rain over the weekend. More than 200,000 homes lost power and hundreds of flights were canceled or rerouted. At one point a tornado watch was issued for the whole of Ireland and parts of Scotland....
Davos Man No Longer Has Time for Climate Change
Whatever’s on the official agenda at Davos, a.k.a. the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, there’s always one item missing: Davos itself. As much as we love talking about what happens there, we love talking about what Davos means much, much more.Unfortunately for anyone living on planet Earth, consensus from this year’s Davos meeting seems to be that any sense of climate urgency there once was has waned.“They are not talking a lot about climate, about biodiversity, about this crisis at all, and that is not acceptable,” Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, an activist from Chad, told...
A New Sculpture Garden in Miami Built to Withstand Heat and Floods
The Underline in Miami is a 10-mile trail that will, over the next few years, repurpose 120 acres of unused land into an urban mobility corridor for pedestrians, dogs, bikers, and skateboarders. The route runs under the Metrorail rapid transit tracks from the financial district at the northernmost end all the way south to Dadeland. It’s New York’s Highline at ground level. For now, only the half-mile-long Phase 1 is complete; the 2-plus-mile Phase 2 will be finished by this spring, and the remaining leg by 2026. Phase 1 begins at a green space called Brickell Backyard near the Miami...
2024 Could Be a Very Bad Year for Emissions
Current conditions: Parts of Western Australia could see temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit • Floods are forcing some U.K. supermarkets to sell smaller vegetables • Americans are bracing for another arctic blast. THE TOP FIVE 1. CO2 emissions could exceed 1.5 Celsius warming threshold this year 2024 is expected to be a record year for carbon dioxide emissions, according to the U.K.’s Met Office. The emissions increase could push atmospheric CO2 levels beyond the threshold for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Driving the surge in emissions is the continued use of fossil fuels, plus the...
Asking People to Use Less Electricity Works
Sometimes to get what you want, all you have to do is ask. That’s what the organizations managing electricity grids across the country (and outside of it, but we’ll get to that) learned this week as plunging temperatures led to record-high electricity usage while lights (and heaters) stayed on.One can get an eyeball sense of the effect these voluntary conservation notices have by looking at the difference between expected electricity demand versus what actually was needed this week. While some of this could just be normal forecasting errors, recent history suggests that big divergences during peak demand hours are...
What a Trump Victory Could Mean for Climate Policy
Current conditions: Parts of Indonesia are under water due to heavy rainfall • Tree branches are heavy with ice in Oregon • A no-burn alert is in place for Southern California as an atmospheric “lid” locks in smog. THE TOP FIVE1. Kerry warns U.S. election stakes for climate policy are ‘as high as they can get’ As election season heats up and a certain bombastic former president looks to take back the White House in November, conversation has turned to what a second Trump presidency could mean for climate policy. Trump has promised to gut the Inflation Reduction Act and cut...
Hyundai and Kia Know the Secret to Selling Electric Cars
America’s electric car market has a new champion. The automaking alliance of Hyundai Motor Group and Kia Motors is now the second biggest seller of electric cars in the United States, according to new data released last week by Bloomberg BNEF.The two companies sold more than 117,000 electric vehicles in the United States last year, or about 8% of all new EVs nationwide, according to the research firm. Only Tesla, the industry’s longtime leader, sold more electric cars: It still commands about half of U.S. market share. The two companies’ success is an encouraging sign in what was more...
The South Is Smashing Electricity Records in the Dead of Winter
America’s largest public power company just set a new record. The Tennessee Valley Authority said consumers used around 34,500 megawatts of electricity on Wednesday morning, about 1,000 megawatts more than its previous all-time record of around 33,500 megawatts in August 2007.While the cold weather across much of the country has strained many power grids, especially those in the South where electric heating is more common, it’s noteworthy that TVA not only broke its winter record, but it’s all-time record as well. By contrast, the market that covers 90% of Texas, ERCOT, set a winter demand record earlier this week,...
How Climate Denial Is Changing
Current conditions: Nashville recorded sub-zero temperatures for only the second time since 1996 • Heavy rains left at least 11 dead in Rio de Janeiro • Invasive and deadly fire ants have been spotted “rafting” on Australian flood waters. THE TOP FIVE1. Climate denial tactics are changing The climate denial movement has entered a new phase, suggests new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The study analyzed transcripts of more than 12,000 climate-related YouTube videos posted since 2018 and found evidence that “old denial” narratives (Global warming isn’t real! Humans have nothing to do with it!) are...
Toyota Is Far Less Climate-Friendly Than Most Americans Think
A year ago, the Toyota Prius went from bulbous to badass. The hybrid icon got its most dramatic redesign in two decades, which dispensed with the familiar friendly and rounded look for an angular, almost menacing front end. The vehicle, which once again came in traditional hybrid and plug-in hybrid variants, earned enthusiasm from buyers and plaudits from the auto press. What Toyota didn’t do, curiously, was finally turn the Prius into a true battery electric vehicle. The world’s largest car company has been among the slowest of the major automakers to embrace 100% electric propulsion. Yet, as Heatmap...
There’s a New Kind of Energy Risk: Cold Winter Mornings
The Texas grid has had two close calls already this week, leading ERCOT, the electricity market that covers about 90% of the state, to ask households, businesses, and government agencies to conserve energy due to high demand. These calls for moderation are nothing new — ERCOT issued several of them issued this summer, when temperatures were over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in much of the state. What’s new is that these calls weren’t coming on sweltering afternoons, but rather on freezing mornings. Traditionally, we start to get nervous about the electric grid in the summertime around sunset. With air conditioners running...
Climate Change Is Making CEOs Nervous
Current conditions: New York City’s Central Park has officially broken its 701-day snow-free streak • Extreme flooding from Cyclone Belal submerged cars in the ocean island nation of Mauritius • It’s 24 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy in Davos, where the 54th annual World Economic Forum gathering begins this week.THE TOP FIVE1. Trump’s Iowa speeches offer preview of 2024 climate attack linesFormer President Donald Trump handily won the Republican Iowa caucus on Monday night, and his speeches at the event were sprinkled with anti-climate lines we’re likely to hear more of in his 2024 presidential campaign, writes Heatmap’s Jeva Lange....
Trump’s Climate Sneak Peek in Iowa
On Monday night, former President Donald Trump handily won what will officially go down as the coldest caucus in Iowa’s history. The global warming jokes, naturally, wrote themselves. But in his freewheeling, name-dropping, teleprompter-free victory speech in Des Moines, Trump showed uncharacteristic restraint in avoiding the low-hanging comedic fruit. Perhaps it was because Trump’s mind was on other things: his civil damages trial that begins in New York City on Tuesday, say. Or maybe, as I suspect, it was part of a larger trend that has come to shape Trump’s third presidential campaign — that he’s honing his attacks...
It’s an Outrageously Good Time to Buy a Used EV
The news that Hertz is selling off one-third of its electric vehicle fleet after limited demand and costly repairs means U.S. consumers just got 20,000 more choices when shopping for a used EV. And with prices continuing to fall, now may be one of the best times to snag a pre-owned electric at a nice discount. But buyer beware. Last year, used car prices finally began to slip after pandemic-induced supply issues. EVs led the way, with pre-owned models down 22% from the previous year, according to Cox Automotive. Tesla saw the biggest price drops, specifically with the average Model...
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