It’s long been clear that Elon Musk’s primary talent is not dreaming up electric cars, reusable rockets, or tunnel-boring machines. It is reshaping reality in a way that always seems to keep Tesla’s stock price high, which made him the world’s richest man. That stock price has be … | Continue reading
Current conditions: A smattering of rainfall did little to contain a massive wildfire raging in Japan • Indonesia is using cloud seeding to try to stop torrential rains that have displaced thousands • At least 22 tornadoes have been confirmed this week across southern states. THE … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Strong winds helped spark dozens of fires across parched Texas • India’s Himalayan state of Uttarakhand experienced a 600% rise in precipitation over 24 hours, which triggered a deadly avalanche • The world’s biggest iceberg, which has been drifting across the … | Continue reading
The Wikipedia article for “wildfire” has 22 photographs, including those of incidents in Arizona, Utah, Washington, and California. But there is not a single picture of a fire in the American Southeast, despite researchers warning that the lower righthand quadrant of the country … | Continue reading
Longtime listeners of Shift Key will recognize the name Intersolar and Energy Storage North America, one of the country’s premier solar industry conferences. Shift Key was live at this year’s event, hosting a panel on the present and future of the solar industry featuring a pair … | Continue reading
Dear Donald Trump, I will be honest with you. I doubted at first. I didn’t understand the plan. But now that I see what you are doing, I have to say: I underestimated you. I was not really familiar with your game. Yes, I finally see it all now. Even though you have attacked envir … | Continue reading
Just as Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico went into effect in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, electricity prices in the Northeast appeared to spike. As I wrote back when the specter of tariffs first loomed in January, New England sources a substantial amount of electricity f … | Continue reading
Current conditions: A large wildfire threatens the Japanese city of Ofunato, which was devastated in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami • Mardi Gras celebrations are in disarray as New Orleans braces for high winds • Statewide tornado drills scheduled for tomorrow in the Carolinas h … | Continue reading
New York City and Los Angeles — America’s two biggest cities — have both burned in the past four months. Though the Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires were far more destructive, turning nearly 40,000 acres of homes, schools, parks, and businesses to ash, the New York fire was i … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Firefighters in Japan are battling the country’s largest wildfire in 30 years • Tropical Cyclone Alfred is hurtling toward Australia’s Queensland coast • Some 170 million Americans are in the path of a storm system that will bring severe thunderstorms and torn … | Continue reading
In the month or so since Donald Trump took office, something new has happened: He has become an austerity president. Trump, Elon Musk, and the rest of their team have frozen spending on hundreds of contracts. They’ve fired as many as 200,000 people across the federal government, … | Continue reading
Ditching the combustion engine for an electric vehicle is a good first step for cutting transportation emissions. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that owning an electric car on its own is not enough. When and how you charge the car makes an enormous difference, not only for … | Continue reading
Grant Faber suspected his short tenure as the program manager for the Department of Energy’s direct air capture hubs initiative was up when he saw an article circulating that the department was set to terminate up to 2,000 employees — generally those who were new to their jobs. W … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Thousands are without power and drinking water in the French Indian Ocean territory of Réunion after Tropical Cyclone Garance made landfall with the strength of a Category 2 hurricane • A severe weather outbreak could bring tornadoes to southern states early n … | Continue reading
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs … | Continue reading
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state. County officials this week issued a public notice encouraging all residents to consider the economic impacts of taking farmland … | Continue reading
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office. The only exception was the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, otherwise known as the Green Bank program. Unfortu … | Continue reading
This week I got the chance to speak with Stephanie Loucas of Renewable Properties, one of the fantastic subject matter experts who joined me this week for a panel on local renewables conflicts at Intersolar. After revealing herself to me as someone in the development space who cl … | Continue reading
The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding, according to a leaked internal memo reviewed by Heatmap News. F … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump is going to be talking rocks with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy during their Friday meeting in Washington, D.C., where they will sign a “very big agreement,” Trump said Wednesday. As the Trump administration has ramped up talks to end the wa … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Firefighters contained a blaze in South Africa’s Table Mountain National Park that was creeping towards Cape Town • Moroccans are being asked not to slaughter sheep during Eid al-Adha this year because ongoing drought has caused a drop in herd numbers • Most o … | Continue reading
Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data … | Continue reading
Thanks to skyrocketing investment in data centers, manufacturing, and electrification, American electricity demand is now expected to grow nearly 16% over the next four years, a striking departure from two decades of tepid load growth. Providing the energy required to meet this n … | Continue reading
Current conditions: An electricity transmission line failure triggered a massive blackout in Chile • Six tropical storms are currently swirling in the Southern Hemisphere • The Santa Ana winds are returning to Southern California this week. THE TOP FIVE 1. Report: EPA urging Trum … | Continue reading
Congress is still debating the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, but the Trump administration has already torn up energy and climate policies across the federal government. It’s time to step back and try to take stock. How much damage has the Trump administration already done … | Continue reading
Approximately 32,000 people drink the tap water in Moses Lake, Washington, an agricultural town in the Columbia River basin approximately 175 miles to the east of Seattle. If you were to sip that water over the course of a lifetime, you’d consume 7,457 times the recommended limit … | Continue reading
As a candidate for president, Donald Trump said he wanted to stop all offshore wind projects on Day One back in office. One month into his latest administration, renewables developers and climate advocates are privately very worried he’s much closer to pulling it off than they ha … | Continue reading
Like so many other businesses in the aviation sector, United Airlines is largely banking on sustainable aviation fuel to power its transition to net-zero emissions. Now the company’s VC arm, United Airlines Ventures, is taking a bet on direct air capture to help produce this fuel … | Continue reading
Current conditions: The Pacific Northwest will soon get some relief from back-to-back atmospheric rivers • Wildfires burning in Canada appear to have survived two consecutive winters • Intense thunderstorms are forecast for Rome, Italy, where delegates are gathering this week to … | Continue reading
Here’s the state of play: The Trump administration has continued to withhold already-obligated funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure law from state and local governments, nonprofits, companies, and other entities. More than a dozen groups have … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Waves off the coast of Washington could reach 25 feet tall as the atmospheric river peaks in the Pacific Northwest • It’s down to 87 degrees Fahrenheit in Rio de Janeiro, which has been enduring its hottest temperatures in a decade • Valentine, Nebraska, will … | Continue reading
These are strange times to be a reporter. The vice president has openly mocked journalists concerned about apparently arbitrary limits to their reporting abilities. Referring to the Gulf of Mexico as such can get you barred from the White House. Say the wrong thing on air and one … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Schools in South Sudan are closing for two weeks due to a heatwave that has caused students to collapse • Unusually heavy snow in Virginia and North Carolina led to hundreds of car accidents • An atmospheric river will bring heavy rain to the Pacific Northwest … | Continue reading
Wildlife conservationists in Wyoming are asking the Trump administration to block wind projects in their state in the name of protecting eagles from turbine blades. The Albany County Conservancy, a Wyoming wildlife advocacy group, sent letters on February 11 and 18 to Interior Se … | Continue reading
Jackson County, Kansas — We’ve been covering anti-renewable lawsuits in the Trump 2.0 era closely at The Fight. But we now have a champion for the most aggressive lawsuit yet: a case filed against a single solar project intended to somehow kill … the entire Inflation Reduction Ac … | Continue reading
1. New NEPA world – The Trump White House overnight effectively rescinded all implementing rules for the National Environmental Policy Act, a key statute long relied on by regulators for permitting large energy and infrastructure projects. What does this mean for renewables devel … | Continue reading
Today’s chat is with House Natural Resources ranking member Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the most important committee for land use in the House of Representatives. This week, Huffman and other Democrats spoke out against efforts by the Trump administration to lay off staff … | Continue reading
Current conditions: New Orleans is experiencing another arctic blast, with wind chills near 20 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday • Continued warm, dry conditions in India threaten the country’s wheat crop • Heavy rain in Botswana has caused widespread flooding. THE TOP FIVE 1. Big G … | Continue reading
The Trump administration filed a rule change this past weekend to remove key implementation regulations for the National Environmental Policy Act, a critical environmental law that dates back to 1969. While this new rule, once finalized, wouldn’t eliminate NEPA itself (doing so w … | Continue reading
The Trump administration will try to kill congestion pricing, the first-in-the-nation program that charged cars and trucks up to $9 to enter Manhattan’s traffic-clogged downtown core. In an exclusive story given to the New York Post, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said th … | Continue reading
JD Vance had a message recently for Germans uneasy about the way Elon Musk has been promoting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party ahead of their country’s upcoming elections: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can surviv … | Continue reading
Nearly half of likely U.S. voters say that Elon Musk’s behavior has made them less likely to buy or lease a Tesla, a much higher figure than similar polls have found in the past, according to a new Data for Progress poll provided exclusively to Heatmap. The new poll, which survey … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Severe storms in South Africa spawned a tornado that damaged hundreds of homes • Snow is falling on parts of Kentucky and Tennessee still recovering from recent deadly floods • It is minus 39 degrees Fahrenheit today in Bismarck, North Dakota, which breaks a d … | Continue reading
The most important energy regulators in the United States aren’t all in the federal government. Each state has its own public utility commission, a set of elected or appointed officials who regulate local power companies. This set of 200 individuals wield an enormous amount of po … | Continue reading
It takes less than an hour to drive from Seattle to Franklin Falls, a beginner-friendly hike that is so popular among locals that it often runs out of parking space by mid-morning in the summer. A winter snowshoeing trip is no less rewarding — the rockface glistens with icicles, … | Continue reading
It takes less than an hour to drive from Seattle to Franklin Falls, a beginner-friendly hike that is so popular among locals that it often runs out of parking space by mid-morning in the summer. A winter snowshoeing trip is no less rewarding — the rockface glistens with icicles, … | Continue reading
As Republicans in Congress go hunting for ways to slash spending to carry out President Trump’s agenda, more than 100 energy businesses, trade groups, and advocacy organizations sent a letter to key House and Senate leaders on Tuesday requesting that one particular line item be s … | Continue reading
Current conditions: It’s 111 degrees Fahrenheit in Rio de Janeiro today, the highest recorded temperature in the Brazilian city since 2014 • India’s national winter games have been postponed due to a lack of snow • At least 13 people have died across the Ohio Valley due to severe … | Continue reading