Officials say an emergency cell phone alert played a crucial role yesterday in helping California avoid rolling blackouts during an extreme heatwave. Residents apparently jumped into action within minutes of receiving a text that urged them to save energy.

A remarkably severe and long-lasting heatwave has put increasing pressure on the state’s power grid since last week. Record-smashing temperatures in the triple digits have sent power demand for air conditioning soaring.

By Tuesday, demand hit an all-time high for the Golden State at 52,061 megawatts, according to grid manager California Independent System Operator (CAISO). CAISO issued a level 3 Energy Emergency Alert, its highest alert, at 5:17PMET that night. It signaled that rotating power outages could be imminent with energy supplies so thinly stretched.

Soon after, at 5:45PM, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) says it issued the cell phone alert. “Conserve energy now to protect public health and safety. Extreme heat is straining the state energy grid. Power interruptions may occur unless you take action. Turn off or reduce nonessential power if health allows, now until 9pm,” the text read. The message was also sent in Spanish.

Within minutes of the alert going out, there was a steep drop in power demand. Between 5:50 and 5:55, it fell by about 1,200 megawatts.

To be sure, CAISO data shows that demand had started to dip earlier in the night — around the time it declared that level 3 alert. But it started to fall more dramatically after the cell phone alert reached folks.

By 8PM, CAISO declared the severe level 3 Energy Emergency Alert over. “Consumer conservation played a big part in protecting electric grid reliability. Thank you, California!” it tweeted.

The Governor’s Office was quick to tout the text messages as a success. “As a result of this action, the California Independent System Operation (CaISO) saw an immediate and significant drop in energy use, providing some relief to the state’s grid,” Cal OES said in a press release yesterday.

The state managed to narrowly avoid widespread rolling blackouts. But tens of thousands of customers, mostly in Northern California, still lost power at some point yesterday. Today, Californians are in their eighth consecutive day under a flex alert that asks them to voluntarily curb their energy use from 4-9PM when power demand typically peaks.

Yesterday wasn’t the first time emergency text alerts have helped officials relieve pressure on its power grid. New York City saw something similar in June 2021. Local officials there sent out a similar text to residents asking them to conserve energy during a brutal heatwave, and power demand soon dropped.

California’s text messages were part of a nationwide system of “Wireless Emergency Alerts.” Those alerts might be sent by federal, state, or local officials to warn of national emergencies, natural disasters, or amber alerts for missing children.

Tech reporters are descending on Cupertino, California, today for Apple’s product launch event, where they’re expecting a first look at new iPhones and Apple Watches. They’ll also be hot — really hot. There’s a suffocating heatwave across the whole state, including in the Bay Area, where temperatures hit all-time highs.

These sorts of extreme heat events are becoming more common because of climate change. The odds of record-breaking heatwaves are far greater now than they were a few decades ago. They’ll be even higher in the next few decades. They’re dangerous, particularly for the elderly, the very young, and people with health conditions like high blood pressure or asthma. They’re even more dangerous when they’re paired with aging power grids like California’s that struggle under the demand for air conditioning, risking blackouts that leave people stuck in the heat.

There’s a certain dissonance to two of the biggest pieces of news coming out of California today being a new Apple Watch and a historic, life-threatening heatwave. Many tech companies happen to make their homes in Silicon Valley, a part of the country at risk from bigger fires, bigger droughts, and bigger floods as the climate continues to change.

Apple and other companies have made commitments to fighting climate change, and Apple says the Cupertino campus where today’s event takes place is powered by renewable energy. But tech companies, including Apple, are lagging behind on their promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to the 2022 edition of the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor.

California seems to have averted the worst-case scenario in this current heatwave — the strained grid held, and the state avoided large-scale blackouts. The heat is starting to subside. But temperatures are still above normal today, and they’ll be felt by everyone at Apple’s event. It’s impossible to ignore. It’s the backdrop to everything now, especially shiny new things: a constant state of climate emergency.

A long, brutal heatwave is expected to grip California at least through the holiday weekend, stressing the power grid. Officials are begging residents to conserve electricity in an effort to prevent outages.

The state is now in its second day of a “Flex Alert” issued by the state’s power grid operator, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). Under the Flex Alert, Californians are urged to voluntarily curb their electricity use between 4PM and 9PM. That’s the time of day when the grid is under the most pressure because it’s when power demand typically rises as people come home from work, and there’s less solar energy available as the sun sets.

Cutting down on energy use during those hours can help stabilize the grid, CAISO says, hopefully preempting rotating blackouts. Charging electric vehicles and using major appliances like washing machines should be done before 4PM, CAISO advises. It also asks residents to precool their homes to as low as 72 degrees Fahrenheit before that time, and then adjust their thermostats to 78 degrees or higher (health permitting) between 4PM to 9PM.

Heatwaves are notorious for stressing out power grids because the high temperatures push people to blast their air conditioning. Temperatures are expected to reach up to 20 degrees higher than normal across much of the Golden State with triple-digit heat through Tuesday, September 6th. Sunday and Monday will likely see the greatest strain on the grid, according to the governor’s office. Daily temperature records have already started to fall in different cities and are expected to keep dropping.

In California, heat spells also prime the landscape for more severe drought and wildfires — which can cut into power supplies if there’s less available hydropower or if utilities have to cut power to keep their equipment from sparking a blaze. This summer, California was forecast to lose half of the hydroelectricity it normally generates due to drought. The state is also in a jam because the current heatwave sprawls across much of the western US, limiting how much help California can get in the form of excess power from its neighbors. And the state has already faced rolling outages triggered by wildfire risk.

The length of this heatwave is also unprecedented, a press release from the governor’s office said. That places prolonged stress on the grid and exacerbates health risks. The lack of respite over a long period of time makes it harder for people to recover from the strain heat places on the heart and lungs. Heat already kills more people in the US than any other weather-related disaster.

“This is just the latest reminder of how real the climate crisis is, and how it is impacting the everyday lives of Californians,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press release yesterday. California legislators just passed a slew of climate bills on Wednesday aimed at cutting the state’s planet-heating pollution down to net zero by 2045.

Newsom declared a State of Emergency on August 31st in response to the heat. That declaration triggers temporary measures to ramp up electricity generation and reduce power demand. For instance, ships berthed at California ports won’t necessarily be required to plug into onshore power — which they’d normally do to reduce air pollution from the vessels’ diesel engines.

We’re about to see the first “triple-dip” La Niña of the century, spanning three consecutive Northern hemisphere winters, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) predicts. The organization issued a forecast today warning of the unusual turn of events: the current La Niña, a weather pattern that can drive severe weather, will likely persist over the next six months into 2023.

“It is exceptional to have three consecutive years with a la Niña event,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a press release. The phenomenon is expected to continue fueling bad weather across far-flung corners of the world.

La Niña typically shows up every two to seven years, usually lasting a year or less. It unfurls across the Pacific Ocean, but its effects can be felt across the globe. Along with El Niño, it’s one of the extreme phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a recurring climate pattern.

During a La Niña, unusually strong trade winds blow warm surface water from the Americas toward Asia. Then from the bottom of the sea, more cool water rises — leading to a cooling effect across the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The consequences of that phenomenon vary from region to region and are never quite the same each year, but La Niña usually has the opposite effects of an El Niño event. Australia tends to get more rain, for instance, while Eastern Africa is usually dryer than normal.

This particular La Niña event started in September 2020. Since then, its “hallmark” has been seen in abnormal weather events around the world, according to Taalas. That includes the longest drought in four decades to hit the Horn of Africa. Facing five bone-dry rainy seasons in a row, more than 50 million people in seven countries stretching across Eastern Africa — from Eritrea down to Kenya and Somalia — are expected to experience food insecurity this year, according to a United Nations-backed report. The latest La Niña forecast confirms that the ongoing drought will continue to worsen, Taalas said.

In Australia, on the other hand, La Niña fed record rainfall. Last week, rain gauges in Sydney recorded over two meters (6.56 feet) of rain since the start of this year. It’s the first time the city has hit that mark this early in the year since record keeping began 164 years ago. Severe flooding has plagued parts of New South Wales, where Sydney is the state capital, throughout the year.

Climate change is also at play when it comes to more extreme weather events — whether that’s drought, flood, or La Niña. Research points to extreme La Niña and El Niño events becoming twice as frequent — to about once every decade — by the end of the century as global temperatures rise.

The WMO forecast a 70 percent chance of this La Niña sticking around through September to November of this year. There’s a 55 percent chance of it persisting from December 2022 to February of next year.

Electric vehicles are very helpful for fighting climate change. But EVs need batteries, and batteries need minerals like nickel, cobalt, and lithium. The US has some of these minerals underground, and it wants to dig them up, expeditiously, so that it doesn’t have to rely as much on other countries, including China.

But this is where it gets tricky. Mining operators say they can speed up the digging process, but a bunch of regulatory roadblocks stand in their way. And environmentalists and tribal groups remain extremely skeptical that all this mining can be done in a way that doesn’t ruin the land and spoil the water.

This more or less summarizes the nearly 27,000 comments that the Department of the Interior has received over the last six months since it published a request for information on ways to improve federal hardrock mining regulations, laws, and permitting practices. The department will need to comb through these comments as it mulls much-needed reforms to a very outdated law. And it will need to figure a way to navigate all these competing interests and concerns as it seeks to bolster US mining to supply rising EV demand while also protecting the environment.

It’s going to be a nearly impossible task.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ new tax and climate bill, devotes nearly $400 billion to clean energy initiatives over the next decade, including EV tax credits and financing for companies that manufacture clean cars in the US. And California said it would ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035, a move that over a dozen other states are expected to follow.

But the only EVs that will be eligible for the $7,500 credit are ones that are made in North America using batteries with minerals dug out of the ground in the US or from its trading partners. These requirements are largely viewed as unachievable by many observers because of the auto industry’s heavy reliance on battery materials and components from China.

This fear is reflected in the comments left by major automakers in response to the Department of the Interior’s request for information. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents nearly every legacy automaker in the US, put it in blunt terms.

“The US does not have significant processing capacity for EV battery materials and is reliant on other nations for refined raw materials, leaving the US market exposed to the risk of being impacted by supply chains outside of US control,” the group said.

This will only get worse as demand for EVs grows, with the Alliance arguing that the lack of critical battery materials could surpass the semiconductor shortage in terms of impact on the economy.

The Zero Emission Transportation Association (ZETA), which represents EV companies like Tesla and Rivian, says the current mining laws do not reflect the urgency to ramp up the domestic supply of minerals.

“If EVs were to represent 100 percent of new car sales — 17 million annually, in line with ZETA’s primary goal — current lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) production would only meet 0.05 percent of total domestic EV battery pack demand,” the group states in its comment.

Most of the ire is being directed at the permitting process for new mining operations, with Ford calling it “lengthy, costly, and inefficient.” A new mine in the US can take seven to 10 years to complete all the permitting and paperwork before going online. In Canada and Australia, that process only takes two to three years, Ford notes.

The US should streamline the permitting process to get new mining operations into production faster, the companies recommend. They also want more transparency from all the agencies involved, and a stronger commitment to maintaining deadlines and more money to fund geological surveys to find new mineral deposits. Enacting these changes could spur “enormous economic growth,” Ford claims.

Environmental groups see it a little differently. They largely support the government’s clean transportation goals, but they worry about trampling current environmental rules — and especially tribal lands — in the rush to extract as many minerals as possible.

“The green energy revolution cannot be built on a dirty mining industry, outdated regulations, and environmental injustice,” Samuel Penney, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe in Lapwai, Idaho, writes in his comment submitted to the Department of Interior.

If the US is to meet its climate goals, it needs a lot more lithium, cobalt, and nickel — key ingredients in EV batteries. This is true globally as well; the International Energy Agency estimates that the world will need roughly 20 times as much nickel and cobalt by 2040 as it had in 2020, and 40 times as much lithium.

It may just not be possible. A US Geological Survey estimated that to fully electrify its vehicle fleet, the US will need 1.27 million and 160,000 metric tons of battery-grade nickel and cobalt per year, respectively — both of which exceed total global production in 2021.

EV companies are already looking for ways to reduce their dependency on some minerals, like cobalt, which has been linked to human rights abuses. But using less cobalt would trigger a spike in demand for nickel. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has practically begged the world’s miners to produce more.

The US currently has one operating nickel mine, in Michigan. Its resources are expected to be exhausted by 2026.

The Department of Energy just took a first step toward launching new lithium-ion battery recycling programs in the US. It issued a Request for Information (RFI) yesterday to ask for public input on how to spend $335 million in federal investments for battery recycling that was included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed last year.

Lithium-ion batteries used to power electric vehicles and store renewable electricity are a major building block for a clean energy economy. Recycling could ease the impending squeeze on materials needed to meet rapidly rising demand for those technologies — especially as the Biden administration tries to keep the US on track to meet pollution-cutting goals it’s agreed to under the Paris climate accord.

“Battery recycling doesn’t just remove harmful waste from our environment; it also strengthens domestic manufacturing by placing used materials back into the supply chain,” US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in an August 29th press release.

All in all, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill invests over $7 billion over five years to build up a domestic battery supply chain. That includes $335 million for lithium-ion battery recycling programs. The Department of Energy (DOE) issued the Request for Information in order to help guide its implementation of those recycling programs and plans to take comments from the public until October 14th.

The programs are supposed to improve the process of collecting batteries at the end of their lives and harvesting valuable materials from them. The programs also aim to minimize environmental risks from tossing out and rehashing used batteries while also making battery cycling more popular and developing a new workforce for the recycling industry.

The funding will also go toward finding useful second lives for old electric vehicle batteries. An EV battery might be replaced once it’s lost about 20 percent of its capacity. But that means it could have up to 80 percent of its capacity left for other uses. The battery might be paired with solar panels, for instance, to hold excess energy soaked up during the day so that the clean electricity is available at night. Some car companies, including Nissan, are researching how to reuse EV batteries to store renewable energy for power grids.

Policymakers, meanwhile, are scrambling to figure out how the nation is going to have enough batteries on hand to reach its climate goals. To slash greenhouse gas emissions, Biden wants the power sector to run entirely on carbon-free electricity by 2035 — which will be virtually impossible without a lot more energy storage from batteries. Biden also issued an executive order last year calling for half of all new vehicle sales in the US to be hybrid or electric vehicles by the end of the decade. And California, one of the world’s biggest markets for cars, laid out new rules last week to phase out gas-guzzling cars in favor of plug-in hybrid and battery-electric vehicles by 2035.

Similar shifts need to happen across the world to avoid the worst effects of climate change, like dramatically more severe storms, droughts, and heatwaves. Greenhouse gas pollution needs to drop to net zero by around 2050 to reach goals set out in the Paris climate agreement aimed at ensuring a more livable future. But reaching those goals would require six times more critical minerals in 2040 than were produced in 2021, according to an analysis by the International Energy Agency.

That’s already triggered another conundrum — how to satiate the growing hunger for battery materials without tearing up the environment and harming communities near mines. Mining for things used in batteries like nickel and cobalt has historically been concentrated in a handful of regions, making markets for those materials vulnerable to labor and environmental abuses and supply chain shocks.

To reduce US dependence on minerals mined in those regions, the DOE released a “national blueprint” for manufacturing lithium-ion batteries last year. And the Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act in March to ramp up mining and processing materials within the nation’s borders. But that push for domestic mining has environmental groups and Native American tribes worried about what damage it might cause at home.

If the US prioritizes recycling batteries, rather than relying so heavily on extracting brand new materials, it could help shrink many of those problems.

Tesla’s latest virtual power plant is in Japan. The company announced Friday that it has been quietly installing its Powerwall batteries at homes on the island Miyako-jima since 2021 and now has over 300 installed. It’s the largest commercial virtual power plant in Japan, according to the statement.

Virtual power plants take advantage of solar panels and batteries in private homes. People with those setups can sign up to send extra power back to the electrical grid in their area, giving it an extra boost during situations when it’s at risk of a blackout. The grid can use that power instead of pulling from the gas-fired power plants typically used when the power supply is strained.

The virtual power plant is based on a program at local energy utility in Miyako-jima, Miyakojima Mirai Energy Co, that installs solar panels and storage batteries at no cost.

Tesla already has virtual power plants operating in California and Australia and is working on getting one off the ground in Texas — where it sees an opportunity to add a new source of power to a perennially unreliable grid. In California, people with Powerwalls installed in their homes can get $2 for every kilowatt-hour fed back into the grid when it’s under stress during emergencies or periods of high demand.

People living on Miyako-jima experience regular power outages during typhoons, and the Powerwalls help keep the lights on in individual homes. “During typhoons, lights are available, refrigerators are usable as usual,” said a Powerwall customer in a video released by Tesla.

Tesla said it plans to have 400 Powerwall units installed by the end of the year and 600 units by the end of 2023. The company then plans to expand to the rest of the Okinawa prefecture, which covers the constellation of islands stretching between the Japanese mainland and Taiwan.

If people around the world were as enthusiastic cyclers as they are in the Netherlands, we could cut an impressive amount of planet-heating pollution. The Dutch use bicycles to get around more than folks in any other country, cycling about 2.6 kilometers (1.62 miles) a day.

If that was the trend across the world, it would slash 686 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution a year, according to the authors of a new study published this week in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. That’s enormous — roughly equivalent to erasing one-fifth of CO2 emissions from passenger cars globally in 2015.

Cleaning up pollution from transportation is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to slowing down the climate crisis that’s causing more brutal heatwaves, droughts, fires, and storms. Transportation currently makes up a quarter of fuel-related greenhouse gas emissions globally, with half of that coming from passenger cars.

Replacing those gas-guzzlers with electric vehicles gets a lot of media attention as a sure-fire way to keep the climate crisis at a more manageable level. But that transition is happening slowly, and it doesn’t go far enough in reimagining a more sustainable future for transportation.

The bigger picture, beyond cars, includes communities designed to make it easier for people to get around by public transportation, on foot, and on bicycle. Bicycles, in particular, are great for replacing car trips that might be too far to walk and too short for transit, the authors of the new study point out.

They found that bicycle production has actually grown faster than car production between 1962 and 2015. But owning a bike doesn’t cleanly translate to actually using that bike regularly, their study shows. That’s the case in the US, where bicycles tend to be used more for leisure than commuting. Bicycles were used for less than five percent of daily trips in most of the countries studied.

Wu Chen, SDU Life Cycle Engineering, Department of Green Technology, University of Southern Denmark

The difference in the Netherlands and similar countries like Denmark, where there were high rates of owning and using a bike to get around, the paper says, often boils down to culture and environment. Bicycling might be seen as more dangerous, the paper notes, in some places with high traffic death rates where cyclers might have to navigate through streets crammed with cars.

To get over those kinds of humps, the new paper calls for “worldwide pro-bicycle policy and infrastructure.” That might look like more protected bicycle lanes or strategies to overcome the world’s driving addiction through carbon taxes or congestion pricing.

This study is the first to put together a worldwide dataset on bicycle ownership and use by country between 1962 and 2015, according to its authors. They pulled together information from the United Nations, travel surveys, journal articles, and industry reports. They ultimately included 60 countries representing 95 percent of the world’s GDP and bicycle production, import, and export.