Trump Goes for the Climate Killshot

Current conditions: A midweek clipper storm is poised to bring as much as six more inches of snow to parts of the Great Lakes and Northeast • American Samoa is halfway through three days of fierce thunderstorms and temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit • Northern Portugal is bracing for up to four inches more of rain after three deadly storms in just two weeks.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump goes for the climate killshot

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images

The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing this week to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that provides the legal basis for virtually all federal regulations of planet-heating emissions, marking what The Wall Street Journal called “the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date.” The 2009 “endangerment finding” concluded that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, calling for cuts to emissions from power plants and vehicle tailpipes. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the newspaper the move “amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.” In an interview with my colleague Emily Pontecorvo last year, Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman said rescinding the endangerment finding would do “more serious and more long term damage” and “could knock out a future administration from trying to” bring back climate policy. But that, Freeman said, would depend on the Supreme Court backing the administration. “I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s possible,” she said.

At issue is the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, which determined that greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. As Emily wrote last week, “the agency claims that its previous read of Massachusetts v. EPA was wrong, especially in light of subsequent Supreme Court decisions, such as West Virginia v. EPA and Loper Bright v. Raimondo. The former limited the EPA's toolbox for regulating power plants, and the latter ended a requirement that courts defer to agency expertise in cases where the law is vague.” An earlier report in The Washington Post questioned whether the agency would proceed with the repeal at all, fearing these arguments would pass muster in the nation’s highest court.

2. BYD sues the Trump administration over Chinese electric car ban

BYD has sued the United States government over the 100% tariff on Chinese electrics that serves as an effective ban on Beijing’s booming auto exports. Four U.S.-based subsidiaries of the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s trade levies. The litigation marks what the state-backed tabloid Global Times called “the first instance of a Chinese automaker directly and actively challenging U.S. tariffs, setting a precedent and carrying significance for Chinese enterprises to protect their legitimate rights and interests through legal means.”

Outside the U.S., BYD is booming. China’s cheap electric cars are popular all over the world, as Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast covered in December. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deal to increase trade with China will bring the battery-powered vehicles to North American roads. And the Chinese edition of the trade publication Automotive News just reported that BYD is planning a factory expansion in Europe and Canada.

3. Fervo just drilled its hottest well yet

Hot off last month’s news that it plans to go public, Fervo Energy has drilled its highest-temperature well yet. The drilling results confirm that the next-generation geothermal startup tapped into a resource with temperatures above 555 degrees Fahrenheit at approximately 11,200 feet deep. The company announced the findings Monday of an independent assessment using appraisal data from the drilling. The analysis found that the Project Blanford site in Millard County, Utah, has multiple gigawatts of heat that can be harnessed. Its completion will be a breakthrough for enhanced geothermal systems, one of two leading approaches to the next-generation geothermal sector that Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin outlined here. “This latest ultra-high temperature discovery highlights our team’s ability to detect and develop EGS sweet spots using AI-enhanced geophysical techniques,” Jack Norbeck, Fervo’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement.

Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:

4. China makes a major discovery of natural hydrogen

Chinese scientists have for the first time discovered natural hydrogen sealed in microscopic inclusions near Tibet. The finding, which the Xinhua news agency called “groundbreaking,” fills what the China Hydrogen Bulletin called “a major domestic research gap and points to a new geological pathway for identifying China’s next generation of clean energy resources.” Natural, or geological, hydrogen could provide a cheap source of the zero-carbon fuel and give oil and gas drillers a natural foothold in a new, clean industry. In the color spectrum associated with hydrogen, the rare, naturally formed stuff is called white hydrogen. But as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in December, a new color has joined the rainbow. Orange hydrogen refers to a family of technologies that naturally spur production of the gas, as the startup Vema is now attempting to do.

China’s coal-fired power generation decreased 1.9% last year, marking what the consultancy Wood Mackenzie called “a historic shift driven by new non-fossil generation that has finally outpaced demand growth.” Power demand surged 5% in China last year, but for the first time in a decade that wasn’t propelled by coal plants. Instead, that new demand was supplied by renewables, nuclear, and hydro, all of which Beijing has rapidly deployed. Over that time, the levelized cost of energy — a widely used though, as Matthew wrote last year, far-from-perfect metric — fell 77% for utility-scale solar and 73% for onshore wind. “At the heart of this transformation is the unprecedented expansion of renewable energy capacity,” Sharon Feng, a senior research analyst for Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “China’s wind and solar capacity had risen more than ten-fold to 1,842 gigawatts over the past decade.”

5. The world’s largest independent oil trader says demand will take longer to peak

Gone are the days when the oil industry seemed to be on track for a lucrative decline. Demand for crude will take longer to peak than previously estimated as governments prioritize growth and energy security over efforts to curb consumption. That’s according to a report issued Sunday by Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil trader. “Over the past year, decarbonisation policies have become a less decisive driver of efforts to curb oil consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” the report stated, according to Bloomberg. “Policy priorities have increasingly been reframed around economic competitiveness and geopolitical strategy.”

THE KICKER

The race for a long-duration energy storage solution has a new competitor. The Dutch startup Ore Energy has deployed its iron-air storage technology successfully on the grid for a technical pilot of its system that can store for 100 hours of power. The pilot, the first of its kind in Europe, demonstrated that the company’s technology can store and discharge energy for up to four days. “This pilot allowed us to evaluate iron-air performance under European operating profiles and real-world grid conditions,” Aytaç Yilmaz, co-founder and CEO of Ore Energy, said in a statement.