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Americans Know About Solar. They Don’t Know the Paris Agreement.
The biggest debates during the annual United Nations climate conference, underway this week in Dubai, always center around language. The Paris Agreement, the 2015 treaty significant for uniting almost every country in the world in supporting a common strategy to address climate change, was almost scuttled by an argument over whether nations “should” cut emissions or “shall” do it. This year, delegates are at odds over whether the world should “phase down” or “phase out” fossil fuels, and whether to allow for “abated” fossil fuels, a euphemism for the use of carbon capture technologies that prevent emissions from entering the...
It Was a Big Week for Weird Little EVs
The Americanization of electric cars is in full swing, with every U.S. automaker doing what it does best: building ever larger, heavier, and more spacious vehicles. So it's refreshing to see Stellantis, the parent company of Fiat, bringing its first new EV to the States in the form of a reborn 500e. Fiat The 500e was beloved when it first landed a decade ago, providing a quick, ultra-compact hatchback...
You Really Ought to Lease Your EV
Four years ago I drove my beloved brown dog home from the high desert beagle rescue in our little red EV. She sat silently in my wife’s lap, wondering what this new life might entail, and spent the ensuing months shedding stabby hairs on the seat cover and slobbering on the back windows as we drove back and forth to the mountains above Los Angeles to hike our way through the darkest days of COVID. Now, she has lost exclusive access to the back seat. Two weeks ago, white-knuckled and nervous, I drove my newborn daughter home from the...
The ID.4 Could Be Volkswagen’s First EV Made With U.S. Union Labor
In Shawn Fain’s victory speech after the United Autoworkers won significant raises and benefits from the Big Three automakers earlier this fall, the union president promised to go on to accomplish what no other UAW president had managed to do. “We’re going to organize non-union auto companies like we’ve never organized before,” he said. On Thursday, the union made its first move: Workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee went public with a union drive, announcing that more than 30% of the plant had signed union authorization cards. After the UAW won 25% raises in its deals with GM, Ford, and...
Ireland Just Set a New Wind Energy Record
The “green” puns pretty much write themselves. On Wednesday, Ireland set an all-time high for wind output on the Irish grid at 4,629 megawatts, Green Collective reports. By midnight Thursday, wind had accounted for a smidgen over 70% of Ireland’s total electricity demands for the day. Wind generation has been falling since about 6pm so we're calling it: the new all-time, all-island high for wind output on the Irish grid is 4629MW, seen at 4pm this afternoon \ud83e\udd73\n\nWind generation so far today equivalent to 73% of electricity demand - full report tomorrow!\n\n\ud83c\udfc5\ud83c\udf43\ud83d\udea8 —...
A Trade Storm Is Brewing in Dubai
The European Union launched the first stage of its carbon border tax this fall, and the world’s biggest emerging economies aren’t happy. As of October 1, the EU regulation officially known as the “carbon border adjustment mechanism” requires importers to report the emissions associated with making steel, cement, fertilizers, and other carbon-intensive products. Those embedded emissions will then be subject to a targeted carbon tax starting in 2026. The tariff isn’t merely punitive — rather, it’s intended to keep companies in the EU competitive with those in countries with lower or nonexistent carbon regulations. (The EU has capped internal carbon emissions...
COP28 So Far: A Cheat Sheet
It’s a “rest day” at COP28, which means there probably won’t be a ton of news coming out of Dubai as delegates take a breather before the climate talks shift into high gear tomorrow. That makes now a good time to reflect on what’s happened so far and what to expect as the conference enters its second half. Some key accomplishments:The loss and damage fund: On day one of the conference, world leaders reached a landmark deal to help vulnerable nations deal with the costly effects of climate change. The early accomplishment set an optimistic tone for the summit...
Bill Gates on COP28, the Green Premium, and Trump’s Threat to Climate Tech
Eight years ago, at the Paris climate convention, Bill Gates committed $2 billion to fighting climate change.You have to admire his ROI. Since then, Breakthrough Energy, the set of Gates-linked climate groups, has become ubiquitous on the topic. It invested in dozens of climate-tech startups, and Gates personally lobbied for the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Gates has also come to formulate a big idea: the “green premium,” the gap between the cost of a fossil-fueled technology and the cost of a climate-friendly one. Right now, electricity generation has almost no green premium, for instance — solar power...
AM Briefing: Solar Milestone
Current conditions: Parts of the Great Plains and Upper Midwest could see record high temperatures today • Australia is in the grips of a ferocious heatwave • The Greek village of Metamorfosi has voted to relocate its residents to the nearby town of Palamas following devastating September floods. A thunderstorm warning is in effect today for Palamas. THE TOP FIVE1. A quick COP recap It’s a “rest day” at COP28, which means there probably won’t be a ton of news coming out of Dubai. But now’s a good time to reflect on what’s happened so far, and what to expect as...
Republicans Weave a Climate Conspiracy at the Final Debate of 2023
Who, or what, was the biggest villain of the fourth Republican debate? Vivek “The Most Obnoxious Blowhard in America” Ramaswamy would, of course, be an easy pick. So too would “the three previous Republican debates,” which were all so painfully boring that most Americans probably didn’t bother to investigate if Wednesday’s host network, News Nation, was actually a real channel. (Whadda you know, it is!). But there was another villain, too: a shadowy threat that, you’d think from the tone on stage, imperils nothing less than American freedom, our values, and everything we love. And no, it wasn’t Donald...
Coral Bleaching Is a $9 Trillion Problem
Coral reefs are a thing of wonder, both organism and underwater infrastructure that houses thousands of species of fish. They are also, as you might already know, in grave danger. Climate change is contributing to massive waves of coral bleaching around the world, from the Great Barrier Reef to the ocean off of Florida, where an extreme oceanic heat wave this year turned mile after mile of reef a ghostly white. We’ve known about coral bleaching for years, but a new report out Wednesday draws fresh attention to corals’ plight, including reefs — along with ice sheets, rainforests, and ocean...
Al Gore Said Something Funny at COP28
Al Gore is done mincing words. In a TED Talk this past July titled “What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know,” the former U.S. Vice President and long-time climate champion took aim at the major oil and gas producers. “They have used fraud on a massive scale,” he said. “They’ve used falsehoods on an industrial scale. And they’ve used their legacy political and economic networks, lavishly funded, to capture the policymaking process in too many countries around the world.” So you can imagine how he might feel attending COP28 in a petrostate (the United Arab Emirates), hosted...
Orsted Powers Up America’s First Major Offshore Wind Farm
Out in the Atlantic Ocean, 35 miles off the eastern tip of Long Island, sits a single, mammoth wind turbine. On Wednesday, its oscillating blades started sending power into the New York grid. The South Fork Wind Farm is officially the first utility-scale offshore wind project operating in the United States. The turbine was installed just two weeks ago with union labor, and it’s the first of 12 that are expected to be completed by early 2024. Each one will have three blades measuring 318 feet from base to tip, or about twice the length of an olympic-sized swimming pool. When...
Republicans’ Climate Whisperer Is Still At It
Bob Inglis was snorkeling in Australia’s Great Barrier reef in 2008 when he had what he called “an epiphany.’’ The then-Republican congressman from a very conservative district in South Carolina had scoffed at climate change throughout his two terms in the House, but his certainty had begun to give way four years earlier when his son told him, upon turning 18, that he needed to “clean up his act on the environment.’’ The comment stung. Inglis was still thinking about it in 2008 during a congressional trip to Antarctica, where he saw researchers extract ice cores that showed steadily rising levels...
‘Humanity Has Opened the Gates of Hell’ and 9 More Times the UN Secretary General Slayed
United Nations Secretary General António Guterres opened his welcome speech at COP28 in Dubai on Friday with a present-day image of a warming planet. Just days before, he told world leaders, he was standing on the melting ice of Antarctica.“This is just one symptom of the sickness bringing our climate to its knees,” he said. “A sickness only you, global leaders, can cure.”He was just winding up.“We are miles from the goals of the Paris Agreement – and minutes to midnight for the 1.5-degree limit,” Guterres went on. “But it is not too late.”He called for leadership, cooperation, and...
The Paragraph that Could Make or Break COP28
It’s day seven of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, and while today’s official talks and panels will focus on green solutions for cities, a debate about the future of fossil fuels is raging on the sidelines. Delegates argued well into the night Tuesday over the wording that will appear in the final draft of the all-important global stocktake (GST), which will be presented at the end of the conference. The GST is the “heart” of COP, Politico says. It summarizes how nations are performing on the climate pledges made in Paris in 2015, and sets an agenda for the...
AM Briefing: Keeping Cool
Current conditions: An atmospheric river brought life-threatening rain and flooding to Washington State • The U.S. Coast Guard is responding to another oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico • It is -52 degrees Fahrenheit in Yakutsk, Russia, one of the coldest cities in the world.THE TOP FIVE1. 2023 is officially the hottest year on recordThe European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) confirmed this morning that 2023 will be the warmest year ever recorded on Earth. The news is not unexpected after back-to-back months of shattered heat records, but it puts added pressure on negotiators at the COP28...
COP28’s Completely Predictable Crisis
The biggest annual event in climate diplomacy is the Conference of the Parties. This year is the 28th conference — hence COP28. As I’ll explain below, such a conference is vital for many reasons. Heatmap’s own Robinson Meyer is reporting there on the ground.But that importance makes it all the more deranged that this year’s conference is being held in the United Arab Emirates. The president of the conference, Sultan al-Jaber, is literally the head of the U.A.E.’s state-owned oil company. As The Guardian reported, at an online event in November, he said: “There is no science out there,...
The Global Stocktake Draft Has Something to Make Everyone Mad
By the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, you’d think we’d have done it all before — but if you did, you’d be wrong. This year, for the first time, negotiators at the conference will produce what’s called a global stocktake report, summarizing the past five years of climate progress and setting the agenda for the next five years and beyond.The stocktake goes all the way back to the Paris Agreement; if countries have to report on their progress toward meeting their climate goals, the thinking goes, they’ll take the agreement...
How John Podesta Is Thinking About the IRA’s Big Final Tax Credits
The rules governing virtually all of the remaining policies in President Joe Biden’s climate law — including some of its most important and generous provisions — will come out in the next several weeks, signaling a new era in the law’s implementation, a senior White House advisor told Heatmap in an exclusive interview.Speaking on the sidelines of the United Nations climate conference in Dubai, the advisor John Podesta said that the Treasury Department will publish rules governing some of the law’s biggest remaining subsidies by the end of the year. The former White House chief of staff and veteran...
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