Economy
AM Briefing: Trump and the Deep-Sea Mining Debate
On critical minerals, Tesla’s home battery business, and India’s heat wave
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On critical minerals, Tesla’s home battery business, and India’s heat wave
On auto imports, special elections, and Volvo’s new CEO
On skirting pollution rules, Arctic sea ice, and Empire Wind
On auto levies, NOAA’s new lawyer, and the future of FEMA
On deadly blazes, China’s carbon market, and the goal of tripling renewables
On the IEA’s latest report, wildfires in North Carolina, and EV adoption
Current conditions: A wildfire in New Jersey’s Wharton State Forest has burned 2,300 acres • An ancient Roman bridge collapsed in central Spain after extreme rainfall from four consecutive storms • Los Angeles could see record-breaking March heat today with temperatures nearing 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
The ballooning price tag of President Trump’s tax cut wishlist and preliminary budget negotiations on the Hill are pointing toward a budgetary showdown in which many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s benefits could become fiscal casualties. D.C. veterans, including former GOP Hill staff, tell Heatmap that even the most bipartisan parts of the IRA could be sacrificed in the budget reconciliation process in order to make room for Trump’s biggest legislative priorities, including extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security, and removing the cap on the state and local tax liability deductions.
The Congressional Budget Office, as well as third-party groups like the Tax Foundation and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, have estimated that an extension of the 2017 tax cuts would cost between $3.7 and $4.5 trillion through 2034. If all of Trump’s additional proposed tax cuts were enacted, the cost would jump to $6.8 trillion, according to Penn Wharton. Congress is still at the beginning of the reconciliation process. The next step is for the House and Senate to negotiate a topline number and issue instructions to the committees that will write the final bill on the levels of spending they’re allowed to include.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo and Jael Holzman explain, the dollar amount assigned to each committee is a ceiling, and it’s calculated on a net basis. So if the Ways and Means committee, which oversees tax legislation, is assigned a $4.5 trillion deficit ceiling, as it was in the version of the reconciliation instructions that recently passed the House, it’s going to have to find several trillion dollars worth of spending programs to cut. Fully repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits — which, according to new modeling from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, would raise about $850 billion — will start to look harder to avoid.
Major wildfires erupted in the Carolinas over the weekend, burning more than 4,000 acres and threatening some areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Helene six months ago. Debris from hurricanes makes already battered areas more vulnerable to fires, Colleen Hagerty wrote for Heatmap in the aftermath of Helene. And as Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote more recently, researchers are pointing to the South as a new area of wildfire concern.
South Carolina’s governor declared a state of emergency Saturday as the Table Rock fire spread to cover 300 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, prompting evacuations. In North Carolina, several large fires are raging out of control in Polk County, southeast of Ashville, where last year’s Hurricane Helene brought devastating floods and debris. Much of Polk County is enduring drought conditions. High winds, dry vegetation, and low humidity are fueling the fires, but response efforts are also hampered by steep terrain and hurricane debris that has yet to be cleared. Mandatory evacuations were in effect for some parts of Polk County.
A home destroyed in a fire in North Carolina.Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Global energy demand rose by 2.2% last year, faster than the average pace seen over the past decade or so, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review 2025 report. The rise was led mostly by the power sector as record warmth meant greater need for air conditioning, especially in emerging and developing countries. “Nearly all of the rise in electricity demand was met by low-emissions sources,” the report said, with renewables and nuclear providing 80% of the growth in global electricity generation. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose last year (by 0.8%) but at a slower rate than in 2023. “The global increase of 300 million tonnes of CO2 was influenced by record high temperatures,” the report said. “If weather in 2024 had remained consistent with 2023, itself the second-hottest year on record, about half of the increase in global emissions would have been avoided.”
In case you missed it: We now know which grants the Environmental Protection Agency has canceled. A document the EPA shared with the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives. Here’s the full list of grants, by program.
A new study finds that political views remain a key factor in determining whether someone chooses to buy an electric vehicle. The report, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined new EV registration data at a county level between 2012 and 2023 and found that during those years, the scale of the EV market expanded, yet nearly half of all sales were in the 10% most Democratic counties. Researchers controlled for other factors, such as income and gas prices, and still, the strong correlation between political ideology and EV adoption remains. And it hasn’t decreased over time. “We find little evidence that the U.S. EV market has broadened across the political spectrum from 2012 to 2023,” the researchers say. There were some exceptions, though: EV trucks and vans are “significantly less concentrated” in left-leaning counties compared to electric cars and SUVs.
California now has nearly 50% more EV chargers than it does gas pumps. According to the California Energy Commission, there are roughly 178,000 EV chargers in the state, compared with approximately 120,000 gas nozzles.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.