Current conditions: Spring rainshowers and thunderstorms will move over the Central and Eastern U.S. at the start of the week • The Eta Aquarids meteor shower, the result of debris from Halley’s Comet, peaks Monday night and Tuesday morning in the Northern Hemisphere • It’s another sunny day in Rio de Janeiro, where authorities are investigating an attempted attack on Lady Gaga’s Sunday outdoor concert at Copacabana Beach.
THE TOP FIVE
1. BEVs had their second-best month ever in Europe — despite Tesla’s tarnished reputation
First quarter new car registrations for the European Union are in, revealing that March was the second-best month ever for BEVs on the continent, up 24% year-over-year with 245,000 units sold, Clean Technica reports. While the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 remained the top-selling electric vehicles for the month, Model Y deliveries were down 41% year-over-year. “The name Tesla has become toxic for many, limiting its appeal, so don’t expect the Model Y’s performance to go back to the sky-high results it once had,” Clean Technica writes. The Model 3, meanwhile, was up 6% year-over-year in March, but down 14% over the whole quarter.
The Renault 5, in third place for the month, delivered just over 8,000 units, marking “a new record for the French model” that could be even higher for April as it benefits from “Tesla’s off-peak month.” The Volkswagen ID.4, sitting in the fifth place spot with almost 7,600 deliveries, saw a remarkable 52% growth year-over-year. Also creeping up the charts was the BYD Song, which had the best result ever in Q1 for a BYD model in Europe.
2. ExxonMobil: Carbon capture is ‘the biggest thing we’re investing in this year’
ExxonMobil characterized carbon capture and storage as “probably the biggest thing we’re investing in this year” during its first quarter earnings call on Friday. “We have the permanent storage, we’ve drilled the wells, we’ve got the monitoring put in place, and so we’re feeling very good about how that business is progressing,” Kathryn Mikells, Exxon’s chief financial officer and senior vice president, said on the call, adding that low-carbon projects amount to “$30 billion of our total [capital expenditure] from 2024 through 2030,” or about 10% of the company’s total capital expenditure. Earlier in the week, energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie said ExxonMobil’s low-carbon investments place it ahead of Shell and BP.
Darren Woods, Exxon’s president and chief executive officer, also shared an update on the company’s planned Baytown Blue Hydrogen project. The project was announced in 2022 and would be the world’s largest such facility if developed; it aims to eventually produce 1 billion cubic feet of low-carbon hydrogen per day. Acknowledging there’s “some debate today with the Trump administration” and that “policy may change,” Woods said, “our expectation is the things that we need to drive low-carbon hydrogen will probably stay in place.” He added that he expects to make a final investment decision on the project “hopefully … later this year.”
3. Australian voters ‘welded shut’ the door on nuclear with Labor Party landslide
Australia’s center-left Labor Party retained power in the national election on Saturday, securing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese a second term in office. He is the first Australian prime minister to win consecutive re-election in two decades, and is expected to secure the largest win for his party since 1946 — a landslide victory many have credited to the conservative coalition leader’s association with President Trump.
Though the Australian campaigns, like Canada’s, did not center around climate issues, “few voters have as much power over climate change as an Australian citizen,” The New York Times writes, noting that the country has the highest per capital greenhouse gas emissions among democracies and that it is one of the biggest exporters of coal and natural gas, which it mainly ships to Asia. During the campaign, the Labor Party pitched voters on quickly deploying wind, solar, and pumped storage hydropower to reduce domestic emissions, while the conservative coalition made a pitch for building new nuclear reactors over the next 10 years. “This was an energy referendum,” Amanda McKenzie, the CEO of Australia’s Climate Council, said. “Nuclear bombed at the ballot, with Australians dubbing it toxic.” Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Kelly O’Shanassy added that the landslide for Labor means the door has not just closed on nuclear — “it is welded shut.”
4. FEMA overlooked ‘thousands’ of remediated properties in L.A. that may have toxic soil contamination: report
Soil testing by the Los Angeles Timeshas found that properties that burned in the Los Angeles fires in January have elevated levels of arsenic, lead, and mercury — in some cases, levels that are “three times higher than the state benchmark.” That is true even of properties remediated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with dangerous contaminants potentially present in “thousands” of the county’s now-empty lots.
Soil testing is a precautionary measure that has followed every major California wildfire since 2007, the Times writes, due to the known toxicity of fire-scorched properties. In my interview earlier this year with Ruben Juarez, one of the lead researchers of the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study, a multi-year effort to track the 2023 Lahaina fire’s physical and mental health impacts on residents, he told me that “60% of participants may have poor lung health, and 40% may have mild to severe lung obstruction. We believe this is associated with the exposure to ash and the [inadequate] personal protective equipment individuals wore when they returned to the fire site.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency “now insists it’s not the agency’s responsibility to meet California’s health standards for private properties,” the Times writes, and has said its current clean-up procedures are “sufficient to rid properties of fire-related contamination.” Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental health scientist and professor at the University of California Berkeley, described FEMA’s attitude as “no data, no problem,” calling the government’s failure to properly clean up contaminated properties in Altadena a “quintessential environmental justice issue.” Read the Times’ full findings here.
5. Scientific societies vow to fill climate research void left by Trump
Two major American scientific societies have announced their intention to produce peer-reviewed studies on climate change in the wake of the Trump administration’s retreat from funding such research. “This effort aims to sustain the momentum of the sixth National Climate Assessment, the authors and staff of which were dismissed earlier this week by the Trump administration, almost a year into the process,” the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union said in their joint statement on Friday. The Trump administration laid off nearly 400 scientists from working on the NCA, which is mandated by Congress and due in 2027. “Our economy, our health, our society are all climate-dependent,” AMS President David Stensrud said, per The Guardian. “While we cannot replace the NCA, we at AMS see it as vital to support and help expand this collaborative scientific effort for the benefit of the U.S. public and the world at large.”
THE KICKER
Hawaii passed a first-of-its-kind law on Friday that will increase the tax on hotels, vacation rentals, and cruise ships to raise money for climate resiliency projects. Officials say the new tax could generate as much as $100 million for the fund annually.
