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On record heat, hurricane warnings, and electric racecars
Current conditions: Nearly 12 inches of rain fell over six hours in Mumbai this morning • Extreme storms on the South African coast are causing shipping delays • July 4 fireworks sparked a forest fire in New Jersey that burned thousands of acres.
Last month was both the hottest June ever recorded, and the 12th month in a row in which average global temperatures broke the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold. Between July 2023 and June 2024, the Earth’s temperature was 1.64 degrees Celsius (or about 3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial average. Global sea surface temperatures were also remarkably warm, averaging 20.85 degrees Celsius, or 69.53 degrees Fahrenheit.
C3S
“This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a large and continuing shift in our climate,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the data. “Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm. This is inevitable, unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.”
Meanwhile, 10% of the country’s population remains under excessive heat warnings as an extreme heat wave grips states up and down the west coast. “Dozens of daily record high temperatures are forecast to be tied or broken into the work week,” the National Weather Service said. In Phoenix, Arizona, heat-related deaths have nearly doubled this year compared to last.
Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast this morning as a category 1 storm with top sustained winds of 80 miles per hour. Up to 15 inches of rain could fall on the region, and flooding and dangerous storm surge are expected. More than 100,000 customers are already without power. The storm is also affecting oil and gas operations: The state’s largest ports – including Corpus Christi, the top crude oil export hub in the country – halted all cargo operations and some natural gas storage facilities also closed in preparation for the storm. Beryl killed at least 11 people in the Caribbean over the last week and left islands in ruins. It became the earliest category 5 storm ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers published a report on Friday concluding that human driven climate change likely made Beryl stronger and wetter.
A lawsuit playing out this week in a New Orleans appeals court could be the first test of how courts will treat regulations set by federal agencies after the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent, known as the Chevron deference, that deferred to agencies’ interpretations of their own mandates. In this particular case, 25 Republican-led states are challenging a rule from the U.S. Department of Labor that says employee retirement plans can consider ESG factors when deciding where to invest. Conservatives have argued this amounts to politicizing investment decisions. A Texas judge refused to block the rule in 2022, citing Chevron, but now the landscape looks very different. “The trial court expressly relying on Chevron in upholding the ESG regulation … puts this case on track to be an early harbinger of how courts will address pending cases,” said Julie Stapel, a lawyer with the firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius. The court will begin to hear arguments tomorrow. The fall of Chevron is expected to make it harder for federal agencies to regulate environmental hazards like air and water pollution.
The U.K. has scrapped its ban on onshore wind farms just days after a new Labour government came into power. The ban came into effect in 2015, and was part of a planning policy that required onshore wind projects to prove local communities did not object to new turbines. The new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, called the rule “absurd.” The Labour Party has pledged to double onshore wind energy by 2030 and decarbonize the power sector completely on that same time frame.
How and when Britain goes green matters on a global scale. “Britain is one of history’s major climate polluters,” as The New York Timesexplained. “It’s where the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, giving rise to a global economy driven by coal, oil and gas and with it, the emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases. So the speed and scale of Britain’s energy transition is likely to be closely watched by other industrialized countries and emerging economies alike.”
NASCAR showed off its first electric racecar in Chicago over the weekend. The ABB NASCAR EV Prototype was developed as part of a partnership between NASCAR, Chevrolet, Ford, Toyota, and electrification company ABB. It hasn’t been driven much yet, and there’s no plan to get rid of gas-powered racers any time soon (in fact NASCAR says it is “committed to the historic role of the combustion engine in racing”), but the prototype is intended to “gauge fan interest in electric racing,” according toThe Associated Press. “As more and more customers are buying all-electric vehicles, there will be, we believe, a growing number of people that want to watch full electric racing,” said Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports.
NASCAR
There are now more than 800 carbon removal startups.
Jessica Hullinger
Jessica Hullinger is a freelance writer and editor who likes to think deeply about climate science and sustainability. She previously served as Global Deputy Editor for The Week, and her writing has been featured in publications including Fast Company, Popular Science, and Fortune. Jessica is originally from Indiana but lives in London.
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Why power lines are harder to build than pipelines
How hard is it to build big clean-energy infrastructure in America? Look at SunZia.
When completed, the more-than-500-mile power line is meant to ferry electricity from a massive new wind farm in New Mexico to the booming power markets of Arizona and California. When finally built, SunZia will be the largest renewable project in the United States, if not the Western Hemisphere.
But as I detail in a recent investigation for Heatmap, it has taken too long — much too long — to build. Nearly two decades have elapsed since a project developer first asked the federal government for permission to build SunZia.
Since it was first proposed, SunZia has endured seemingly endless environmental studies and lawsuits. It has been bought, sold, and bargained over. The end result is that a project first conceived in 2006 — which was expected to operate in 2013 — is now due to open in 2026.
That is a massive problem, because confronting climate change will require the country to build dozens of new long-distance power lines like SunZia. If the United States wants to meet its Paris Agreement goal by 2050, then it will have to triple the size of its power grid in just 26 years, according to Princeton’s Net Zero America study. (That research was led by Jesse Jenkins, who co-hosts Heatmap’s “Shift Key” podcast with me.)
The country is not on track to meet that goal. My story on SunZia set out to determine why.
Here are three major takeaways from my investigation:
At a fundamental level, a power line and a natural gas pipeline aren’t so different: Both move a large amount of energy over a long distance.
Yet it is much easier to build a natural gas pipeline than a transmission line, and they face very different regulatory hurdles in America. When a company proposes a new transmission line, it must get permission from every state whose borders it plans to cross. This can result in an arduous, years-long process of application, study, and approval.
That same obstacle does not hinder gas developers. When a company proposes a new natural gas pipeline, it can get many of its permits handled by a single federal agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC is a one-stop shop for gas pipeline developers, organizing and granting state-level permits through a streamlined process.
(To be sure, natural gas pipelines sometimes need permits from other federal agencies — such as the Bureau of Land Management — before they can begin construction. But transmission developers need to getpermits from those other federal agencies, too.)
But not all of the obstacles are regulatory. Transmission and renewable projects simply look different than pipelines, which can make environmentalists and the public more skeptical of them. Even though pipelines can leak or spill, they can be buried or built closer to the ground than power lines, and therefore pose less of a visual disturbance to the landscape.
In recent years, much of the controversy around SunZia has focused on the San Pedro Valley, a gorgeous desert landscape northeast of Tucson, Arizona. SunZia must pass through the valley to connect to a power station near Phoenix.
Two Native American tribes — the Tohono O'odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache Tribe — sued to block SunZia last year. They argue that the valley has cultural value and must be preserved intact and undiminished.
But the valley is already home to a large natural gas pipeline, mostly — but not entirely — buried underground. (The pipeline is on pylons near Redington, Arizona, where it crosses the San Pedro River.)
In an interview, a leader at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmentalist group that joined the tribes’ lawsuit, said that SunZia’s proposed power line is problematic in part because it will be so tall.
“There are no 200-foot large power lines going through the San Pedro Valley,” Robin Silver, the leader, told me. “The gas pipeline doesn’t have 200 foot towers.”
If environmentalists focus on a project’s visual prominence, then pipelines will virtually always win out over transmission lines.
A federal judge dismissed the tribes’ lawsuit last month. A representative of the Tohono O'odham Nation did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In permitting debates, conservationists and clean energy developers can often become enemies. Traditional conservationists seek to slow down the permitting process as much as possible and move a project away from a treasured or sensitive area, while developers and climate hawks want to build clean energy infrastructure quickly and efficiently.
These fights often play out as costly lawsuits over the National Environmental Policy Act, a 1970 law that requires the government to study the environmental impact of every decision that it makes. Advocates and opponents wind up battling in court over whether or not a project’s environmental impact has been sufficiently studied.
That’s not what happened with SunZia. Some environmentalists and traditional conservation groups, such as the Audubon Society, now praise SunZia’s process.
It wasn’t always that way. During the early 2010s, SunZia’s proposal to cross the Rio Grande in New Mexico was just as controversial as its San Pedro Valley route. The project’s developer wanted to build power lines near a site where tens of thousands of migratory birds, including sandhill cranes, spend the winter.
That changed after the Defense Department forced a major rethink of the line in 2018. Soon after that, Pattern Energy, a San Francisco-based energy developer, took over the project.
Pattern took a different approach than its predecessor and partnered with environmental groups to learn how it could build the power line in the least intrusive way.
It conducted original research on how sandhill cranes fly, and — based on that research — moved the power line to the place where it would interfere with birds the least. It also purchased and donated an old farm property and the accompanying water rights so a wildlife refuge could rebuild habitat for the birds.
Pattern also agreed to illuminate the transmission line with an experimental infrared system to make it more visible to birds.
These changes, which also allowed Pattern to avoid a Defense Department site, were so extensive that it had to apply for a new federal permit.
“Pattern being a company that was willing to have discussions with us in good faith — and that conversation happening before the re-permitting process — was, I think, really important,” Jon Hayes, a wildlife biologist and the executive director of Audubon Southwest, told me.
This collaborative relationship was possible in part because it was facilitated by Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat who represents New Mexico.
Heinrich, a climate hawk and the son of a utility worker, had long championed the SunZia project. So when the project ran into obstacles, he pushed the developer, environmentalists, and the Pentagon to negotiate over a better solution. His office remained deeply involved in the process throughout the 2010s, ultimately helping to broker an agreement over the Rio Grande that all parties supported.
“I firmly believe that when we work together, we can build big things in this country,” Heinrich told me in a statement.
Silver, the Center for Biological Diversity leader, told me that Heinrich’s involvement is the principal reason why SunZia has been praised in New Mexico but criticized in Arizona.
The Grand Canyon State doesn’t have elected officials who were willing to get involved in SunZia and push for a mutually beneficial solution, he said. (For much of the 2010s, Republicans held both of the state’s Senate seats.)
But a project’s ultimate success cannot rest on the quality or curiosity of its senators. Martin Heinrich, as a climate solution, doesn’t scale, and not every clean energy project will have a federal chaperone.
What’s more, America’s existing permitting system — which is channeled through its adversarial legal system — practically discourages cooperation. It pushes developers and their opponents to pursue aggressive and expensive legal campaigns against each other. These campaigns burn huge amounts of time and millions of dollars in legal fees — money that could be spent on decarbonizing the economy.
In order to meet America’s climate goals, developers must build dozens of projects like SunZia, all around the country, in the years to come. That will not happen under today’s permitting system. The country needs something better.
How can we make better use of the areas environmental destruction has left behind?
There are some things money can’t buy, and it seems a clean power grid is one of them. Despite authorizing billions of dollars to subsidize renewable energy development through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration remains off track to reach its target of 100% clean electricity by 2035. Even after a banner year in which domestic investment hit $303 billion and the US added 32.3 gigawatts of new clean electricity capacity, the country is still building renewable energy at only half the rate that is needed.
Among the barriers holding up clean energy deployment, local opposition looms large. As developers seek out new sites on which to build wind and solar, they are repeatedly finding themselves at odds with neighbors who object to their projects on aesthetic, economic, or political grounds. Whether through formal laws or protracted permitting processes, these objections have begun to have a noticeable effect on the pace of renewable energy adoption. In a recent survey by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wind and solar developers reported seeing roughly a third of their siting applications canceled over the five years prior, with two of the most common reasons being “community opposition” and “local ordinances or zoning.”
But what if the solution to this impasse has been hiding in plain sight — or more accurately, behind a chain link fence?
The U.S. has around 270 million acres of so-called “marginal land,” a designation that includes retired mines, closed landfills, former industrial facilities, brownfield sites, and depleted or unproductive farmland. That’s around twice the land area that would be required for a renewables-and-nuclear-only power grid, the most land-intensive net-zero scenario modeled by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. These neglected properties are more than just an eyesore for neighbors — they also represent wasted prospects for economic development, and in many cases pose a contamination risk to the local environment. To law professors Alexandra Klass and Hannah Wiseman, however, they are an opportunity in disguise.
In their new paper, forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review, Klass and Wiseman (of the University of Michigan and Penn State, respectively) propose directing the bulk of new clean energy development to these marginal lands. It’s a concept they call “repurposed energy,” and it offers a way to, in one fell swoop, avert local objections, reclaim unproductive land, and create new opportunities for economically dislocated communities.
It’s not a new concept — since 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency’s RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative has offered funding to developers looking to build renewable energy on potentially contaminated land.
What the new paper proposes, however, is a greater convergence of public benefits on this specific subset of projects, which Klass views as a down payment on societal acceptance. “If you can come up with a project that’s going to have community support, that means you can actually build it,” she told me. “And that’s worth paying a little extra money up front.”
Consider some of the most common objections to renewable energy siting: that it ruins the view, disrupts habitats, or occupies valuable farmland. Each would seem to carry less weight when applied to, say, an abandoned mine instead of a pristine coastline. Throw in low purchase prices, pre-existing transmission lines at retired coal or gas power plants, and the chance to direct jobs and revenue to low-income communities (where contaminated properties are disproportionately located), and you’ve got, in theory, an attractive site for a solar or wind farm.
In spite of these upsides, practical examples of repurposed energy remain few and far between. Only 0.7% of the renewable energy capacity installed in the United States since 1997 has been on reclaimed land, according to EPA data. That’s because, faced with the possibility of extravagant cleanup costs and liability for prior contamination, most developers prefer to take their chances with a greenfield.
Klass and Wiseman propose a set of policy changes that could, they hope, spur a renewable energy renaissance on marginal lands. First, there are some existing incentives for repurposed energy they propose expanding. Certain state funding programs – like Massachusetts’ SMART Program – and streamlined permitting processes – like New York’s Build-Ready Program – could offer a template for other states seeking to accelerate redevelopment of their own brownfields. Layering more such benefits on top of federal funding opportunities like the IRA’s Energy Infrastructure and Reinvestment Program, they contend, could help stimulate broader interest from developers.
Second, they offer a set of new, more ambitious reforms to entice clean energy companies onto marginal lands. Among them:
Klass sees the paper as a timely contribution at a critical juncture for the renewable energy industry. “We’re at an important moment in time where there’s a lot of federal funding available,” she told me. “But we are not on track to build the amount of clean energy we need to meet our targets.” By focusing support on repurposed energy, she thinks policymakers may be able to erode some of the sociopolitical barriers holding back the industry.
There is evidence to support this belief. A 2021 study found that objections to wind farms tended to fade when the infrastructure was sited in areas with fewer lakes, hills, or other features of aesthetic or recreational value, suggesting that plants sited on already-disturbed land might indeed arouse less opposition. “You start with these types of projects that we hope will engender less community opposition and provide more community benefits,” Klass said. “Maybe you scale it up later, maybe you don’t. But it allows a pathway through some of this local opposition.”
It’s a view that resonates in the industry, although that doesn’t make this kind of development easy. Jonathan Mancini is the senior vice president of solar project development at Ameresco, which has built solar on around 20 landfills across the United States. He told me that sites with soil contamination are capped with an impermeable barrier to prevent the hazardous material from spreading, and building a solar farm on top requires using bespoke racking systems that won’t penetrate that cap. On top of that, would-be developers have to employ third-party engineers to monitor the cap’s integrity and undergo additional reviews by state regulators to ensure that the weight of the solar system will not damage it. “Currently, the permitting timeline for such projects takes up to three years to complete,” he told me.
Dedicated state support in places like Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland has helped Ameresco alleviate some of the costs. “Utility programs or state administered programs do incentivize the use of these types of projects,” Mancini said. But he noted that more support would be helpful to overcome the barriers repurposed energy projects face. “Additional policy measures at the local and/or state level would make these projects move faster through permitting and approval.”
Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and one of the country’s foremost environmental lawyers, thinks the idea could accelerate clean energy deployment. “Local opposition is one of the most important impediments [to renewable energy],” he pointed out to me. By undercutting aesthetic and land use concerns, repurposed energy could “have a very positive impact finding ways to reduce that,” he said.
Gerrard also noted, however, that local opposition is not the only barrier to renewable energy development. In addition to more stringent permitting requirements, “transmission, interest rates, supply chains, local content restrictions, workforce shortages — all of those are impediments,” he said. Repurposed energy is no magic bullet, he added, but it doesn’t have to be. “We need a lot of magic buckshot,” he said, “and this article proposes quite a few pellets.”
On weekend weather, the U.K.’s election, and China EV tariffs
Current conditions: Rain storms prompted China to evacuate 240,000 in the east • A heat wave is breaking records in Moscow • Beachgoers along the Gulf of Mexico are cautioned to beware dangerous rip currents this weekend.
More than 100 million people in the United States remain under heat alerts. A dangerous heat wave is baking the West, with temperatures expected to peak today and tomorrow. In some desert areas, temperatures could reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit. “It’s not your typical heat wave,” said Joe Sirard, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. “This is a dangerous heat wave, this is a high-end heat wave. Very dangerous.” The heat, combined with high winds and dry conditions, have increased the risk of wildfires across California, where firefighters are already battling blazes. The Thompson Fire in Northern California scorched 3,700 acres and forced nearly 30,000 people to evacuate. “Oppressive” heat and humidity will also plague the Southeast today and tomorrow. 
The Thompson Fire burns in Butte County. CAL FIRE
Hurricane Beryl is lashing Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula after devastating Jamaica. The system, which is currently a category 2 storm, has wind speeds of up to 110 miles per hour and is expected to bring a lot of rain and dangerous storm surge. Parts of southern Texas could feel the storm’s effects this weekend. At least 11 people have died in the hurricane and many buildings across several Caribbean islands remain without power.
The Labour Party won a landslide victory in the U.K.’s general election, which means that Keir Starmer is the new prime minister and 14 years of Conservative rule have come to an end. Starmer has vowed to transform the U.K. into a “clean energy superpower.” Here are some of his environmental pledges:
The Green party saw its best election results ever, and quadrupled its representation in government.
The European Union confirmed yesterday it will impose new tariffs of up to 38% on Chinese EV imports. When added to the existing duty of 10%, the tax could be nearly 50%. The move is intended to protect EU car manufacturers from an influx of cheap EVs but could also increase EV prices across the bloc because, while “Chinese EVs are a relatively rare sight on U.S. roads,” they're quite common in the EU, the BBC noted.
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Germany passed reforms that will guarantee people living in apartments have the right to install solar systems on their balconies. The new rule means landlords or other authorities will not be able to block the installations except for in exceptional circumstances. “The right to harvest solar power is thus legally enshrined,” Carsten Körnig, the head of the BSW solar power association, said in a statement. “This is tangible climate protection and is likely ot further increase acceptance of the energy transition.” More than half of Germany’s population lives in rented housing, Reutersreported, and demand for balcony solar-power systems soared in 2023.
Scientists discovered three plant species in South America that are closely related to the tree that produces cocoa beans. The discovery could help researchers produce climate-resistant cacao trees, and protect chocolate production.