Electric Vehicles
AM Briefing: EV Sales in Focus
On car trends, Cali’s power outages, and Google’s emissions
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On car trends, Cali’s power outages, and Google’s emissions
On liquified natural gas exports, BYD vs. Tesla, and heat protections
They’ve become a stump speech punchline.
On storm forecasts, Biden polling, and data centers in space
Why one of our best tools to fight climate change suffers on a hotter planet.
On Biden’s 2024 tightrope, climate lawsuits, and flood insurance
Current conditions: Severe storms dropped hail stones on Madrid • More than 500 people have died during a heat wave in Pakistan • A home near Minnesota’s failing Rapidan Dam was swept into the raging Blue Earth River.
President Biden and former President Donald Trump will meet in Atlanta tonight for the first presidential debate of 2024. The head-to-head comes as millions of Americans endure extreme weather events – from dangerous heat waves to wildfires to unprecedented flooding – made worse by climate change and our use of fossil fuels. If climate change comes up at the debate (and it may not), it’ll be interesting to see how both candidates handle it. Trump will probably attack Biden for cracking down on the fossil fuel industry. And while oil and gas production is soaring under Biden, he may not want to draw attention to that particular accolade as he vies for young progressive voters and touts his green agenda. “The dynamic could force Biden, who has made fighting climate change a pillar of his second-term pitch, to walk a rhetorical tightrope,” E&E Newsnoted.
A new report finds that climate lawsuits have risen in the last 20 years. While the overall number of cases has leveled off slightly recently, those filed against companies (as opposed to governments) are growing. About 230 were filed between 2015 and 2023, and the majority of those were launched in the last three years, according to the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Here you can see the number of cases targeting corporations specifically since 2015:
Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
The report says the trend is driven in part by a rise in lawsuits targeting the “professional and financial services that enable the work of fossil fuel companies.” For example, marketing and advertising companies that create positive campaigns for oil and gas firms. And another factor here is sectors that rely heavily on fossil fuels (airlines, for example) but may attempt to “climate wash” by overstating their environmental initiatives. These kinds of corporate lawsuits are becoming more and more common, and more than 70% have been successful. The report concludes that “companies from many sectors are now at risk of being taken to court over the climate.”
Ford has chosen Long Beach, California, as the place where it will build its low-cost EV platform. The city’s mayor, Rex Richardson, announced the news yesterday. Ford has been bulking up its “secretive low-cost EV team” in recent months, hiring workers away from rivals like Rivian and Tesla. The Long Beach campus will open in early 2025 and house 450 employees who will focus on “developing a new generation of small, affordable vehicles,” according to Emma Bergg, a spokesperson for Ford’s EV division.
Many Midwesterners don’t have flood insurance that would help them cover the damage from recent flooding events, ABC News reported. In the parts of Iowa that were inundated over the weekend, less than 1% of single-family homes have flood insurance from the government. One reason is because residents don’t expect to be flooded because they don’t live near major rivers or in areas that have historically been at high risk. But climate change is making extreme rainfall more common. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange explained, “put simply, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, which means worse deluges.”
Rondo Energy, a Silicon Valley startup building “heat batteries” to replace fossil fuels in heavy industries, announced three new customers yesterday. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported, in just a few months’ time, the company has gone from serving a single industry — ethanol — at its pilot plant in California, to making deals around the globe that demonstrate the technology’s potential versatility. With grant funding from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, as well as the European Investment Bank, the company will install three commercial-scale batteries at factories in Denmark, Germany, and Portugal. Each one will prove Rondo's compatibility with a different industry: In Denmark, the battery will be used to produce low-carbon biogas. In Germany, it will power a Covestro chemical plant that produces polymers. In Portugal, it will power a to-be-announced food and beverage factory.
Scientists are surprised to find that some small, low-lying islands in the tropics aren’t sinking even as sea levels rise due to climate change, The New York Times reported. Instead, it seems the islands can “adjust naturally” to the sea level changes, which offers a glimmer of hope to the islands’ residents.
On a major EV joint venture, livestock taxes, and tipping points
Current conditions: Puerto Rico issued a heat advisory for the entire island for the first time ever • Flooding and landslides in Ivory Coast left at least 24 people dead • A fast-growing wildfire in central Oregon prompted evacuations.
Volkswagen announced it will invest $5 billion ($1 billion now, another $4 billion over a few years) in EV pickup company Rivian as part of a joint venture “to create next generation software-defined vehicle (SDV) platforms to be used in both companies’ future electric vehicles.” The move will give VW access to Rivian’s technology, and Rivian a much-needed financial lifeline as it tries to launch its new R2 vehicles while cutting production costs. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said the money will allow Rivian to move ahead with plans to build a new manufacturing plant in Georgia. The news sent Rivian’s stock soaring, and Scaringe said the cash will help the company reach profitability. The company reported a $5.4 billion net loss last year.
Tesla’s Cybertruck was recalled again yesterday. This time, Tesla says the recall (which applies to more than 11,000 trucks) addresses a faulty front windshield wiper, and trim pieces that can apparently fly off the vehicle and hit people nearby. This is the pickup’s fourth recall since sales began last November. The wiper will be replaced free of charge. As for the trim, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tesla will apply an “adhesion promoter and pressure sensitive tape” to make sure it stays in place, or replace it if it’s already missing.
Our current projections for sea level rise from the melting ice sheets may be “significant underestimates,” according to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The researchers said they identified a potential melting process by which warm seawater makes its way into the gap between the ice and the ground beneath it, known as the “grounding zone.” This water melts holes in the ice, allowing more warm water through, creating a feedback loop. “We find that grounding zone melting displays a ‘tipping point like’ behavior, where a very small change in ocean temperature can cause a very big increase in grounding zone melting, which would lead to a very big change in flow of the ice above it,” said Alex Bradley, an ice dynamics researcher at the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the new paper. Bradley said this finding could help explain why the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting faster than scientists would expect, and called for incorporating seawater intrusion into the existing models.
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Data from Booking.com shows how the heat waves baking the U.S. are influencing Americans’ summer travel plans. Nearly 64% of vacationers indicated that rising local temperatures were a factor in their choice of vacation spot for the July 4 holiday, and about one-third of travelers are considering coastal areas, hoping that proximity to water will keep temperatures cool, Reutersreported. Panama City Beach, Florida, and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina were among the destinations seeing a rise in searches.
In a world first, Denmark will start taxing farmers for the methane their livestock emit. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and livestock are a major source of emissions because ruminant animals like cows belch the stuff. Denmark’s new measure will charge farmers the equivalent of about $17 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent starting in 2030, increasing to roughly $28 by 2035. According toThe Associated Press, a typical Danish cow produces methane emissions equivalent to 6.6 tons of CO2, so the new tax could add up to about $112 per year per cow in 2030, jumping to nearly $185 per cow per year by 2035. The hope is that other countries follow Denmark’s lead and that the tax will “lay the groundwork for a restructured food industry.”
“We have fought many wars over oil. We will fight bigger wars over food and water.” –Sunny Verghese, chief executive of Singapore-based agricultural trading house Olam Agri, speaking to the Financial Times