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You can cross this one off your list of things to worry about.
A 4.8 magnitude earthquake in New Jersey shook the ground and blew up my group chats this morning. It’s somewhat unusual, but not unheard of, to experience earthquakes in this part of the country, and some may be wondering, is this yet another extreme event that will become more likely under a changing climate?
The answer is maybe, but no one really knows yet.
In case you don’t remember 4th grade science, what we experience as an earthquake is typically the result of sections of the earth’s crust colliding, separating, or sliding past each other. This movement is driven by changes occurring deep underground, far from the influence of surface temperatures or CO2 concentrations.
The only potential connection between climate change and earthquakes is related to water. Changes in surface water, whether because of heavy rain, snow, or drought, could either increase or relieve stress on geologic faults, causing them to shift.
But scientists are still untangling whether there is a relationship between climate-driven changes in surface water and earthquakes. Some studies have found a correlation between shifting seasonal water loads, like from the build up of snow or a rapid melt, and micro earthquakes — quakes so small they can’t be felt by humans. Scientists have also found an uptick in glacial earthquakes — rumblings related to glacial ice lurching forward, cracking, or falling — which may be related to the warming climate.
It’s an active area of investigation, but for now, a surge in earthquakes should be the absolute least of your worries when it comes to the warming planet.
Emily Pontecorvo
Emily is a founding staff writer at Heatmap. Previously she was a staff writer at the nonprofit climate journalism outlet Grist, where she covered all aspects of decarbonization, from clean energy to electrified buildings to carbon dioxide removal. Read More
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Now it’s in the courts.
The legal battle over the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new rule on climate-related disclosure has begun. On Thursday, the Commission issued a pause on the rule, which sets standards for publicly-owned companies to report their exposure to climate-related risks like extreme weather or future regulations in their annual filings.
The rule finalized in early March was significantly weaker than what the Commission had originally proposed in 2022. Rather than make disclosure mandatory, the regulations say that companies only have to report certain types of information, such as their greenhouse gas emissions, if they deem the information “material.” Despite this, the decision invited swift backlash from all corners, including from the energy industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Republican states, and environmental groups.
Between March 6, the day the rules were finalized, and March 14, at least nine petitions were filed in multiple courts of appeals seeking review of the final rules. Liberty Energy Inc. and Nomad Proppant Services, two oilfield service companies, filed a motion seeking a stay pending judicial review. The petitions were later consolidated for review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, where the Chamber of Commerce and several other business groups also filed a motion seeking a stay. Now, the Commission has decided to accede to the request and pause the rules as the court reviews the petitions.
“In issuing a stay, the Commission is not departing from its view that the Final Rules are consistent with applicable law,” the order said. “Thus, the Commission will continue vigorously defending the Final Rules’ validity in court.”
The rules were not set to go into effect until 2026, so it remains to be seen whether or by how much the legal challenges will delay implementation. Margaret Farrell, the chair of the securities law group at the firm Hinckley Allen told the Wall Street Journal that she didn’t think the legal challenges would “fundamentally change” the direction things are heading in. “There is an obligation, which the SEC underscored a few years back, to consider the impact of climate change and climate events on the business,” she said, “regardless of the new rule.”
A 4.8 magnitude tremor just surprised East Coasters.
East Coast residents from Philadelphia to Boston all just looked up and went, “Did you just feel that?”
Yes, they did: A 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck Central New Jersey Friday morning — not strong enough to cause severe damage in most cases, and smaller than the 5.8 magnitude quake that struck the Washington, D.C., area in 2011 and rippled up north. But this one was certainly strong enough to feel.
Earlier this year, a tiny, 1.7 magnitude quake hit in New York’s Astoria neighborhood, causing little to no destruction. (Reports of a transformer explosion due to the quake turned out to be unfounded.) Thomas Pratt, a research geophysicist for the U.S. Geological Survey, told The New York Times that actually, New York gets lots of tiny earthquakes each year. Earthquakes of this magnitude, however, are decidedly less common.
By contrast, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan on Wednesday, causing at least nine deaths and more than 1,000 reported injuries. The insurance damages are still being assessed but will no doubt reach into the billions. That quake also sent major shockwaves through the global computing chip supply chain, as the world’s largest chipmaker, TSMC, was forced to halt production and evacuate.
The immediate aftermath of the New Jersey quake produced no reports of severe damage, and New York Metro Weather reported that there was no tsunami risk anticipated. Airports in the region grounded flights to evaluate safety conditions. The event seemed mainly to have given Northeasterners an excuse to log into Twitter again for the first time in months.
For my part, sitting in my apartment in New York and trying to collect my bearings, the light fixture over the dining table suddenly looks askew. But to be honest, it’s probably been that way for a while.
To the tune of more than half the models delivered in the first quarter.
Americans might remain tepid on electric vehicles. But they are snapping up conventional hybrids.
More than half of the Ford Maverick compact pickup trucks sold last quarter had conventional hybrid engines, the automaker said on Wednesday, a sign of how rapidly hybrids and plug-in hybrids are ascending in the American car market.
Ford sold nearly 20,000 Maverick hybrids during the first three months of 2024, 77% more than during the first quarter of 2023, the automaker said. Those Mavericks made up the majority of the 38,421 hybrids that Ford sold across its line-up last quarter.
“We listened to our customers and want to offer them freedom of choice,” Jim Baumbick, the vice president of product development and operations at Ford, told me in an exclusive interview. “Customers can do the math — a lot of Maverick customers are very focused on value for money.”
The sales success comes as Ford, the domestic automaker that has been most enthusiastic about EVs, has intensified its focus on conventional and plug-in hybrids. On Thursday, Ford announced that it plans to offer a hybrid version of each of its gasoline-burning vehicles by the end of the decade. The company recently added an additional shift at its Hermosillo, Mexico, factory that makes Maverick trucks, and it doubled the production of full-size F-150 hybrid pickups.
In the same announcement, however, Ford also said it would push back the launch of its next-generation electric vehicle, a new three-row electric SUV, from 2025 to 2027. That suggests that the automaker’s current EV offerings — the Ford Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning, and Ford E-Transit delivery van — will remain its flagship electric vehicles for much of the rest of the decade.
“We know the destination: EVs are going to be a much bigger part of our product portfolio in the future,” Baumbick said a day before the announcement. “But we also know the tail on internal combustion-based products is going to be much longer.”
On the one hand, Ford’s sudden success with hybrids is unsurprising. Hybrids are a 20-year-old technology that cuts air pollution, saves on gas costs, and can improve a car’s performance. While hybrids aren’t nearly as good for the climate as purely electric vehicles, they can cut carbon emissions without forcing customers to seek out or install charging stations.
For those reasons, auto experts once predicted that hybrids would percolate across the marketplace like, say, automatic transmission or power steering — they were general-purpose features that would improve any car. But instead they are only now catching on, after the initial electric vehicle boom. Perhaps that’s because hybrids were long seen as the green or environmentally premium choice, and only the arrival of mainstream EVs has defanged hybrids as an option for more drivers.
In the interview, Baumbick noted that adding a hybrid powertrain to a Maverick or F-150 now adds only an extra $1,500 or so to a truck’s suggested retail price. “Our goal from the getgo on Maverick was to take a different approach, and it was all about the value. When we launched, we were really trying to lean into attracting more customers to hybrids, because we knew from all the research we had done that they were looking for value. It was a bit of a departure from how we approached it before as a premium offering.”
That idea of hybrids as premium persists elsewhere in the automaker’s line-up. A conventional gas-burning Ford Escape plug-in hybrid can be bought for as little as $29,495, for instance, while a plug-in hybrid Escape has a suggested retail price of $40,500.
For what it’s worth, Ford also reported strong EV growth in the year’s first quarter, but its raw EV sales totals are lower than its hybrid sales. The company sold 20,223 electric vehicles during the year’s first three months, an increase of 86% over the same period a year earlier.
The Mustang Mach-E, a family-friendly crossover that has emerged as the automaker’s best-performing EV, made up about half of those deliveries; its sales were up 77% over the year prior. The company also sold 7,743 F-150 Lightning models, 80% more than a year earlier. What’s not yet clear is whether these better sales translated into financial returns. The automaker lost tens of thousands of dollars for every EV that it sold last year, and it slashed the price of its most premium EVs further at the beginning of 2024. Ford will announce its quarterly earnings at the end of April.
Even as it has slowed its rollout of EVs, Ford has insisted that it believes they represent its future. The very first line of its press release on Thursday was: “Ford continues to invest in a broad set of EV programs as it works to build a full EV line-up.” But in our conversation, Baumbick compared the reasons a customer might buy a fully electric versus a hybrid full-size F-150 pickup. “If their usage is best suited to an EV, we’ve got an F-150 Lightning,” he said. But “if you’re towing for higher distances or longer weights, it increases demand on charging. That’s where a hybrid can be a perfect tool for the job.”
Here at Heatmap, we’ve argued that Ford should add a plug-in hybrid Maverick to its lineup, too — after all, the Maverick is built on the same underlying platform as the Escape. A semi-electric compact pickup could be the “forever truck” for many Millennials. So I asked Baumbick: With Ford now expanding its hybrid offerings, is there any chance we’ll see a plug-in hybrid Maverick anytime soon? He told me that the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation. Hey — that’s better than a straight-up “no.”
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