What Carbon Dioxide Has to Do With the Which means of Life

THE TOP FIVE

1. Transportation Department Joins the War on Wind

Add the Department of Transportation to the record of federal businesses waging what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman referred to as “Trump’s total war on wind.” The Transportation Department said Friday it was eliminating or withdrawing $679 million in federal funding for 12 initiatives throughout the nation designed to buttress improvement of offshore generators. The funding included $427 million awarded final yr for upgrading a marine terminal in Humboldt County, California, meant for use for constructing and launching floating wind generators. The record additionally included a $48 million offshore wind port on Staten Island, $39 million for a port close to Norfolk, Virginia, and $20 million for a staging terminal in Paulsboro, New Jersey. “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy stated in a statement. “Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg bent over backwards to use transportation dollars for their Green New Scam agenda while ignoring the dire needs of our shipbuilding industry.”

It’s simply the Trump administration’s newest assault on wind. The Department of the Interior has led the cost, launching a witch hunt in opposition to any insurance policies perceived to favor wind energy, de-designating hundreds of thousands of acres of federal waters for offshore wind improvement, and kicking off an investigation into hen deaths close to generators. Last month, the Department of Commerce joined the trouble, teeing up future tariffs with its personal probe into whether or not imported generators pose a nationwide safety risk to the U.S. In response, the Democratic governors of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey on Monday issued a statement calling on the administration “to uphold all offshore wind permits already granted and allow these projects to be constructed.”

2. California and Exxon Mobil battle over plastics

Only a tiny share of plastic waste is recycled.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

In what the New York Times referred to as a “sharp escalation” of its authorized technique to fend off legal responsibility for air pollution, Exxon Mobil has countersued California, accusing the state’s landmark litigation over plastic waste of defaming the oil large. At a courtroom listening to final month, Exxon lawyer Michael P. Cash described the lawsuit California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a cadre of environmental teams first filed final yr as “an attack” aimed on the oil firm’s residence state of Texas and stated the problem must be litigated there. As Times reporter Karen Zraick famous, Cash illustrated his level by displaying “a graphic showing a missile aimed at Texas from California” and by evaluating Bonta and his nonprofit allies to “The Sopranos.”

Backed by a parallel lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, and the Surfrider Foundation, Bonta sued Exxon in state courtroom on the grounds that the corporate had deceived Californians by “promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis,” alleging that the air pollution had created a public nuisance and sought damages price “multiple billions of dollars.” The lawsuit mirrors previous litigation over planet-heating emissions, however targets the petrochemical division that has been one of many fastest-growing for Exxon and different oil giants. The courtroom drama got here proper as worldwide negotiations in Geneva over a world treaty to curb plastic air pollution failed after the United States joined Russia and different petrostates to dam measures supported by greater than 100 different nations that may have curbed manufacturing.

3. The U.S. is dealing with potential uranium shortfalls

In North America, nuclear gas might quickly turn out to be more durable to come back by. Canadian uranium large Cameco has warned that delays in ramping up manufacturing at its McArthur River mine in Saskatchewan may shrink its forecast output for the yr. The transfer got here only a week after one of many world’s different main suppliers of uranium, Kazakhstan’s state-owned miner Kazatomprom, announced plans to slash its manufacturing by 10% subsequent yr.

The pullback is occurring proper because the U.S. nuclear business’s dealmaking growth is taking off. Now that Trump’s tax regulation assured that help for atomic vitality would proceed, Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute advised Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that extra reactor plans are coming. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he advised Katie. That consists of Europe. Despite equally torpid building of reactors over the past three a long time, France and Germany have lastly united across the want for extra atomic vitality to energy the continent’s vitality transition. A pact signed eventually week’s Franco-German summit “appears to herald rapprochement on reactors,” the commerce publication NucNet surmised.

4. Cadillac’s rebirth as a luxurious EV maker faces a check

Once a stodgy gas-guzzling automaker, Cadillac refashioned itself as a luxurious electrical car maker in recent times, rising alongside Chevrolet to place General Motors within the No. 2 slot behind Tesla. Roughly 70% of consumers who bought the electrical variations of the Cadillac Optiq or Lyriq switched from different luxurious manufacturers, together with 10% who beforehand owned Tesla. That quantity may rise with Tesla’s model loyalty nosediving, as this text beforehand reported. “We’re in a position of great momentum,” John Roth, the worldwide vp of Cadillac, advised The New York Times. “We offer more electric S.U.V.s than any luxury manufacturer, all with more than 300 miles of driving range.” But as Times reporter Lawrence Ulrich wrote, “that moment will soon be tested” as the electrical automotive business reels from the repeal of tax credit in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

The challenges forward are greatest illustrated by way of the Escalade, Cadillac’s iconic luxurious SUV. The firm offered simply 3,800 electrical Escalade IQs within the first six months of the yr. While that’s a powerful displaying for a three-row SUV beginning round $130,000, the V-8 engine gas-powered Escalade begins at about $87,000, and offered about 24,000 automobiles – roughly six instances as many as the electrical model.

5. Legal battle over Border Patrol’s arrest of firefighter heats up

Lawyers in Oregon are demanding the discharge of a firefighter arrested final week by Border Patrol whereas preventing a wildfire in Washington state. The man, whose identify hasn’t been launched, was amongst two firefighters cuffed within the Olympic National Forest as they fought to include the Bear Gulch Fire that had burned about 14 sq. miles as of Friday and compelled evacuations. The arrests sparked a political firestorm over what critics noticed as a jarring instance of the warped priorities of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. That’s significantly so within the case of this firefighter, who attorneys stated had acquired his U-Visa certification from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon in 2017 and had submitted his U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services utility the next yr.

When the AP requested the Bureau of Land Management why its contracts with two firefighting corporations had been terminated and 42 firefighters had been escorted away from Washington’s largest wildfire, the company declined to remark. The choices got here because the American West is actually a tinderbox. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported, Washington and Oregon are each at excessive threat of a megafire igniting this fall.

THE KICKER

Turns out mammoths weren’t simply within the icy tundra. Scientists in Mexico found mammoth bones, shedding gentle on a once-obscure inhabitants of extinct tropical elephantids that ranged as far south as Costa Rica. In a paper revealed this week in Science, National Autonomous University of Mexico paleogenomicist Federico Sánchez Quinto documented the beforehand unknown lineage of the Santa Lucía mammoths, which he stated break up from northern Columbian mammoths a whole lot of hundreds of years in the past. “If you had told me 5 years ago that I would be collecting these samples, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” he stated. “This paper really is an exciting beginning of something.”