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This Icelandic Volcano May Surprise You
If you were to walk down the street in the Icelandic town of Grindavik right now — which, to be clear, you shouldn’t — you would find a scene out of the apocalypse. Cracks in the road emitting ominous steam. A low rumbling beneath your feet. Deserted homes and buildings all around and nary a human in sight. What you would be experiencing, as any Icelander could tell you, is the prelude to a volcanic eruption. Iceland sits across two tectonic plates — the place where they meet is a tourist attraction — and many of the country’s 32...
Offshore Wind to Get a Little Tax Boost
The beleaguered offshore wind industry got a small boost from the Biden administration on Friday in the form of a proposal that would expand the definition of what qualifies for a 30% clean energy investment tax credit.Offshore wind farms have many different components beyond just the turbines, and developers have been seeking clarity on where the dividing line was between the equipment that would qualify for the tax credit, and any interdependent infrastructure like transformers and transmission lines. Under the new rules, developers would be able to include the cost of subsea cables that bring the power to shore,...
Inflation Is Killing Long-Term Climate Bets
Every company is, in a certain light, a kind of time machine, and every new product is a missive from the past. When a group of people get together to launch a startup, they’re making a bet that in a few months or years, people are going to want what they’re selling. In the software industry, the past isn’t too long ago. Because it is possible to code and distribute an app somewhat quickly, a new software product might have only been conceived earlier that year or a year or two earlier. In a mature consumer-product field — like,...
Los Angeles Spreads the EV Wealth Around
Los Angeles officials on Thursday announced a plan to make the clean energy transition cheaper for low-income residents, The New York Times reports. “Working families in our city need to be assured that our city’s clean energy future won’t leave them trapped in the past,” Mayor Karen Bass said. “Many working families — some working two to three jobs to make ends meet — won’t buy or lease EVs if they don’t have access to convenient, timesaving, cost-saving places to charge them.” The move comes in response to a study, also released Thursday by a coalition of city, state, and...
Can Xi and Biden’s Climate Deal Prevent a Second Cold War?
The past couple years have seen escalating tensions between China and the United States. On the one hand, the brutally repressive nature of the Chinese government has become undeniable, with the crushing of protests in Hong Kong and the ongoing cultural genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. On the other, the Biden administration has tightened Trump-era technology controls intended to prevent China from developing cutting-edge expertise in semiconductors, as well as other trade restrictions. Chinese and Taiwanese fighter jets are routinely getting into squabbles over Taiwan’s airspace.It sure looks like another cold war is developing. However, we saw...
Mike Munsell and Jillian Goodman Join Heatmap News
The climate news website Heatmap News announced today the hiring of Jillian Goodman as Deputy Editor and Mike Munsell as VP of Sales. Jillian most recently served as Opinion Editor for The Information and previously was Deputy Editor for Bloomberg Green, Politics Editor for Bloomberg Businessweek, and Associate Editor at Fast Company. She has also held positions at New York Magazine.Mike comes from the founding team at Canary Media where he headed up sales as their Director of Growth. He also was the author of a regular column, Climate Meets Culture. Previously he led marketing for Wood Mackenzie Power...
China’s Wildly Complex Energy Transition, Explained in 8 Charts
Ahead of President Biden’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco on Wednesday, the U.S. and China released a joint statement that represents a breakthrough in the two countries’ climate change negotiations. Most notably, the Asian superpower has finally agreed to set concrete targets to reduce emissions across its economy. The statement asserts that the U.S. and China will work together and with other parties at the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Abu Dhabi, known as COP28, to “rise up to one of the greatest challenges of our time for present and future generations of humankind.” Underlying the...
Oil Companies Are Preparing for a Lucrative Decline
The oil industry is not telling a credible story about its own future. Far from doubling down on the future of oil — as they’d have us believe — and as climate action advocates fear – the most powerful oil producers are planning for obsolescence, but they’re hoping to do it on their own, lucrative, terms. The end of more than a century of growth in oil use is almost here, but it’s not straightforward. One of the world’s leading forecasters of energy trends is now emphatic that the amount of oil, gas, and coal used around the world each day...
New York’s Year of Battery Fires Keeps Getting Worse
A lithium-ion battery sparked a deadly blaze that killed three family members in a Brooklyn brownstone over the weekend, the FDNY revealed on Monday. Two electric scooters, powered by lithium-ion batteries, were found at the site. Per WABC, the fire started in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights at around 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. Though firefighters arrived at the scene in under four minutes, the brownstone was already engulfed in a wall of flame. The fire ultimately claimed the lives of three generations of the West family: Albertha West, 81, as well as her son, Michael West, 58 and...
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unmanned, Aerial Flamethrowers
I confess that when I first heard about flamethrowing drones, I did not think they sounded like a good idea. Being an American sometimes means learning that flamethrowers can get marked down for Black Friday (25% off! Bitcoin accepted!) and that a device that shoots literal fire is “not considered a firearm” in the United States. These discoveries did not leave me with the best first impression; drones struck me as untrustworthy enough before I learned they were being rigged to ignite things. But for all that they sounds like they belong in a supervillain’s arsenal, fire-starting drones could also save...
New Climate Report Warns We Could Lose What Makes Us Americans
Tucked about two-thirds of the way through the overview of the U.S. government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment — a congressionally mandated, roughly quinquennial summary of how climate change is affecting the country — comes a startling observation. Climate change is not just increasing the chance of catastrophic natural disasters like heat waves and hurricanes, nor are the tolls only economic, with “billion-dollar disasters” now happening on average once every three weeks. The researchers found climate damages are also rending the very fabric of what makes us Americans.Hundreds of scientists contributed to the new report, which synthesized thousands of pages...
ExxonMobil Is Getting into Lithium
ExxonMobil on Monday announced plans to produce lithium in an area of southern Arkansas known for its vast deposits of the mineral, a key material in the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries. The company aims to begin producing battery-grade lithium in 2027 in a 120,000-acre area known as the Smackover formation, “using conventional oil and gas drilling methods” from depleted oil wells. The ore would then be processed nearby, and sold as, imaginatively, Mobil Lithium. An oil company’s desire to, in its words, “supply the manufacturing needs of well over a million EVs per year” by 2030 might seem...
Don’t Believe the Story About ‘Slowing’ EV Sales
If you’ve read about electric vehicles in the news lately, you know the vibes are bad. Over the past few weeks, the media has fixated on the idea that consumer demand for EVs is “slowing,” “chilling,” or “losing its charge.” But are sales even slowing? Has federal policy failed to spark the EV transition? Is there any cause for panic? The data shows none of that is true.The best (and only) quantitative evidence presented for the dominant media narrative is data from Cox Automotive, as presented in a recent Wall Street Journal article, showing that dealers are taking more...
The Irreverent Punks Trying to Flip the Energy System on Its Head
The hottest ticket in Brooklyn last week wasn’t for an indie rock show or a buzzy new restaurant. It was for the most niche, nerdiest clean energy conference of the year — the sold-out DERVOS 2023.The conference name — a satirical play on Davos, a stuffy, World Economic Forum event attended by governmental and business elites — tells you much of what you need to know about this irreverent subculture of the climate movement. A teaser video for DERVOS described it as a “rad clean energy summit … where youths get DER-pilled and the hot takes haven’t been approved...
Canoo Has Made Another Sick Truck That You Can’t Buy
The electric vehicle startup Canoo Technologies has announced another extremely cool-looking pickup that you probably won’t be able to buy. On Friday, Canoo unveiled the “American Bulldog,” a gray, weatherized, all-electric pickup truck that the company says is inspired by a vehicle initially made for the U.S. Army. Here’s the hype video: The American Bulldog www.youtube.com ...
We’ve Been Counting Bats in All the Wrong Places
American bats have been having a rough time lately. In 2006, a deadly disease called White-nose Syndrome appeared on the East Coast, dusting the faces of bats there with a white fungus that sapped their fat reserves while they hibernated over the winter, starving them before spring arrived. The widespread use of pesticides made things worse, as did the wind turbines springing up around the country: Bats seem to be worse at dodging them than the hawks and eagles that tend to grab the attention of conservationists, and nearly a million of them are killed by turbines each year....
Joe Manchin Was America’s De Facto Climate King
What can you say about Joe Manchin, perhaps the most important — and most complicated — American climate policy maker of the past decade? Let’s start here: Soon, he won’t be a senator any more. On Thursday, Manchin announced that he will not pursue re-election in West Virginia in 2024. “I’ve made one of the toughest decisions of my life and decided that I will not be running for re-election to the United States Senate,” he said in a video message. Instead, he said, he will be “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest...
The Age of Inescapable Wildfire
When Manjula Martin was growing up in Northern California in the 1980s, wildfires weren’t something she thought about much. She knew about disaster — the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which killed 63 people and injured thousands, hit when she was a teenager — but fire, she thought, was just something that happened up in the mountains in the summer. Things are different now. In 2017, Martin left the high prices of San Francisco for the redwoods of Sonoma County. The night of their housewarming party, a firestorm swept through Santa Rosa and Sonoma and Napa counties....
Nikki Haley Called Ron DeSantis the ‘E’ Word
Tonight, at approximately seven feet above sea level, the five leading Republican presidential candidates not named Trump assembled in a performing arts center in Miami to once again go through the motions of pretending this is a normal election cycle. If you happened to be doing something else with your finite mortal hours on Wednesday evening, though, you didn’t miss much. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy made every effort to maintain his status as the group’s enfant terrible with obnoxious barbs that didn’t even spare the moderators; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina managed to use a Bible verse to talk about...
The Sporty EV Pickup of My Dreams Is Coming — But Not to America
My wife drove one of the last great little trucks. The 2000 Toyota Tacoma had no extended cab and no frills, just a bench seat and a short bed to shuttle her stuff back and forth from L.A. to Berkeley. To no one’s surprise, it still runs. We just moved a loveseat in it this weekend.That kind of two-door utilitarian pickup, which was commonplace in the heyday of the Chevy S-10 and Ford Ranger, is critically endangered in the era of supersized F-150s and Ram 1500s. And the new EVs in the truck space are predictably big. Toyota, though,...
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