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Biden’s New Hydrogen Rules Are Here. They’re Way Bigger Than Hydrogen.
The most generous, lucrative, and all-around lavish subsidy in President Joe Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is the new tax credit for clean hydrogen production. Under the policy, a company can get a bounty of up to $3 for each kilogram of hydrogen made with clean electricity that it produces and sells. There are few legal limits to what a company can earn.So it figures, then, that this subsidy has been the subject of maybe the most acrimonious, dramatic, hair-tearing fight over the law so far, one that saw snoozy lobbyists and power plant operators take out...
American Fuel Economy Just Hit a Record, Thanks to EVs and Hybrids
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is out with its annual Automotive Trends Report for 2022 model-year vehicles, and the numbers are some of the best it’s seen. Average emissions are at a record low and fuel economy is at a record high — and according to preliminary 2023-model-year data, those trends will continue into the new year.Overall, the EPA says average real-world CO2 emissions for new vehicles sold in 2022 dropped by 10 grams of carbon dioxide per mile for an average of 337 g/mile, the lowest the agency has recorded. On the other side, fuel economy averages are...
Scientists Are Coming Around on Geoengineering
Katherine Ricke, a University of California at San Diego sustainability professor, turned to face the roomful of attentive scientists at the American Geophysical Union a few weeks ago. In any other year, she would have been about to break one of climate science’s biggest taboos. “Geoscientists know very well at this point that solar geoengineering is not a very good substitute for emissions reductions,” she said. “The question that comes next, then, is, Is solar geoengineering a complement to mitigation?” The answer, she then argued, was yes. While cutting greenhouse gas emissions might bring down the planet’s temperature in the long...
U.S. Battery Production Is Going Great, Actually
Back in April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced new vehicle emissions standards that seem poised to transform how our roads look. They’re so strict, according to NPR, that up to 67% of new vehicles sold in 2032 would have to be electric to meet them. Immediately, it looked like that would be a problem. The Inflation Reduction Act stipulates that, in order to be eligible for tax credits, electric vehicle components — including, crucially, the batteries — can’t be made by a country on the U.S.’s “foreign entities of concern” list. That rules out batteries made in China, which is,...
AM Briefing: Insects in Decline
Current conditions: Southern California remains at risk of flooding and may even see some waterspouts or tornadoes • A wildfire is burning out of control in Perth, in Australia • It's the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. THE TOP FIVE 1. U.S. may hike tariffs on Chinese EVs The Biden administration is reportedly considering raising tariffs on electric vehicles made in China, which tend to run cheaper than those made in the U.S. The move would be an attempt to “bolster the U.S. clean energy industry,” explains The Wall Street Journal. Chinese EVs are already subject to...
Poll: The Americans Who Worry Least About Climate Change
When Canadian wildfire smoke descended on my hometown in Indiana this summer, I was distraught. I live in London now, but much of my family remains in the Midwest, and as an orange haze blanketed the landscape and the air quality plummeted, I worried about their health. “Smoke everywhere!” my dad texted, alongside a photo of the fields near my childhood home, shrouded in smog. “Guess I better stay inside when I get home.” The effects of climate change will vary from region to region, but everyone’s life will be affected in some way, eventually. Even though I know this...
AM Briefing: Bird Files for Bankruptcy
Current conditions: Southern California is bracing for heavy rain • China's bitter cold is complicating earthquake rescue efforts • Iceland's capital of Reykjavik could be hit by pollution from a volcanic eruption.THE TOP FIVE1. E-scooter company Bird files for bankruptcyE-scooter company Bird, which “put electric scooters onto the sidewalks of major cities,” is filing for bankruptcy in the U.S. Just five years ago the company reached “unicorn” status with a $1 billion valuation faster than any startup ever before. But “Bird grew too quickly — it launched in too many cities before it had a viable model,” one former...
How the Heat Dome Stole Christmas
I’m not normally concerned about having the perfect home — though I’m also not normally interviewing Mr. Christmas Tree himself from my living room, with a scraggly, disco-lit Nordmann fir in the background of my Zoom shot.A high-quality tree should have “up-turning branches, so they’re not drooping,” he was telling me. “They have really nice dark green needles” and “what I would consider to be a uniform density, all the way to the top of the tree.” As he talked, my eyes slid to the corner of my computer screen, where I noticed that the topper on my rather...
Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Gets Similar Prison Sentence to Defrauder of Holocaust Victim
Yesterday, a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Nikola founder Trevor Milton to four years in prison for lying to his investors about his electric truck startup’s prospects and progress. Last year, a jury found Milton guilty on one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud.Prosecutors had asked for an 11-year prison term and a $5 million fine. While Milton will be required to pay a $1 million fine, plus an amount of restitution to be determined later, the judge in the case, Edgardo Ramos, said he took to heart the letters he'd received from Milton’s friends...
What Two Record-Breaking Floods Taught Vermont
There’s a brook that runs along the Mountain Home Park in Brattleboro, Vermont, providing the sort of pleasant babbling sound people play at night to help them fall asleep. On a typical morning, the water moves quickly and is shallow enough that you can see the rocks under the surface. But when a storm comes through, long-time resident Angela Johnson warns, this steady stream can turn treacherous.“We watch it every day when it’s raining — it doesn’t matter if it’s a heavy storm, the brook rises quite quickly,” Johnson told me. “It has and it will continue to break...
AM Briefing: 2035 or Bust
Current conditions: A volcano on Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula has finally started to erupt • At least 120 people were killed in an earthquake in China • Meteorologists say Americans on the East Coast hoping for snow in January should keep “expectations in check.”THE TOP FIVE1. Some EU countries pledge to decarbonize power systems by 2035A handful of countries within the European Union have pledged to decarbonize their power systems by 2035. The group includes France and Germany, the two biggest power producers in Europe. They’re joined in the commitment by the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, which is...
The Next Front in Climate Activism Is De-Privatizing Utilities
Voters in Maine were confronted with an unusual decision when they went to the polls this November. Question three on the ballot asked Mainers if they wanted to eliminate the two private utilities that delivered electricity to 97% of the state. A new, nonprofit utility called Pine Tree Power would take over the service, and it would be overseen by a publicly-elected board.Though the proposal may sound radical, it’s not unheard of. Since the dawn of the electric grid, communities have periodically decided to municipalize their utilities. The city of Sacramento, California, took over PG&E’s local electric distribution franchise...
AM Briefing: A Combustion-Engine Crackdown
Current conditions: More than 130,000 people on the East Coast are without power after a weekend storm • Freakishly strong winds killed at least 13 people in Argentina • China’s deep freeze continues to defy forecasters’ expectations. THE TOP FIVE1. Australia’s Queensland flooded by lingering tropical storm The remnants of Tropical Cyclone Jasper brought intense rain and flooding to several towns in Australia’s northeastern region of Queensland. About 24 inches of rain fell on the city of Cairns in a span of 40 hours, which is more than triple the December average, according to Reuters. At least 12,000 people are without...
A House in the Sierra Nevadas Built to Withstand Both Fire and Ice
Faulkner Architects have practiced from Truckee, California in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range for 35 years. The firm’s particular approach to design takes inspiration from founder Greg Faulkner’s former work in aircraft design. “Precision is one of the things we’re about,” Faulkner told me. “I was part of the wing group at Cessna. I drew — by hand — the wings and all the parts that make up a wing for the Citation III, the first intercontinental business jet with a low swept wing.” (A low swept wing improves aerodynamic performance.) Translated to architecture, Faulkner thinks about precision in the...
Poll: Americans Overwhelmingly Want Climate Change Taught In Schools
When I was in high school, I had to memorize the entire taxonomic hierarchy of the American moose. But I never learned about greenhouse gases. This never struck me as odd until I read a recent op-ed in The Boston Globe by Anita Soracco, a professor of physics and environmental science at Massachusetts’ Quinsigamond Community College. “Over the past 13 years,” she wrote, “my students have consistently expressed disappointment and dismay that they hadn’t previously been taught about the climate crisis or the many environmental justice issues that plague their communities as a result.” What’s perhaps even more dismaying is that...
The One Good Oil Nation
The annual COP 28 gathering is over, and it’s about time. As Robinson Meyer writes here at Heatmap, many important things came out of the conference, despite the utter joke of holding it in a notorious oil dictatorship — the United Arab Emirates — with the head of that country’s state oil company serving as president.Yet another major oil-producing country at the conference was consistently on the right side of climate, namely Norway. The Norwegian delegation advocated for aggressive climate action, including a large energy transition fund to be focused on the poorest countries, announced millions in new investment...
The Arctic Is Hot and Full of Algae
As climate world fixated this week on the final wranglings at COP28, the researchers studying our changing planet delivered more bad news about the Arctic. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 18th annual Arctic Report Card was packed this year with words like “exceptional,” “extreme,” “unprecedented,” and “uncharted,” as one of the harshest places on Earth continues to melt and bloom before our eyes. Arctic sea ice contracted in 2023 to the sixth-lowest level in the satellite record as the region sweltered under its hottest summer and sixth-hottest year ever documented. Record low May snow cover in North America was followed...
AM Briefing: Peak Coal?
Current conditions: A major storm will batter the U.S. Eastern Seaboard this weekend • Moscow is buried under record snowfall • It's 50 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy in Paris, which was recently named the world's top city destination. THE TOP FIVE1. IEA: Coal demand remains high, but could peak soonGlobal demand for coal remains at a record high, but is expected to start declining in 2026, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) “Coal 2023” report. Most advanced economies are ditching this dirtiest of fossil fuels: Coal consumption fell by about 20% in the United States and the European...
The World’s Most Vulnerable Nations Got Shut Out at COP28
In the moments after Sultan Al Jaber, the president of this year’s COP, struck his gavel to finalize the text of the first-ever global stocktake, Anne Rasmussen, the lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, took the floor. “We are a little confused about what just happened,” Rasmussen said. “It seems that you gaveled the decisions, and the small island developing states were not in the room.” Rasmussen and her colleagues, it turned out, had left the room to discuss the changes they wanted to see in the text, with the idea that they could come back and present...
If You Thought Dubai Was a Bad Place for COP, Wait Until It Goes To Azerbaijan
When the announcement came that COP29 will be held in Baku in 2024, the immediate reaction in the climate community was “again?!” It wasn’t that Azerbaijan — a nation of about 10 million people, situated on the Caspian Sea at the southern tail of the Caucasus mountains — had hosted the global climate summit before. Actually, it almost didn’t get the 2024 hosting gig at all: COP29 was briefly homeless after Russia vowed to block Bulgaria’s bid (because Bulgaria is part of the European Union) and longtime enemies Azerbaijan and Armenia vowed to block each other’s bids (because of...
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