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He promised to protect almost a third of the U.S. So far he’s nowhere close.
Over the course of a presidential term, a mature ironwood tree will add only about four inches to its height. Unless you happen to see one during the 10 or 12 days in May that pale pink flowers cover its branches, it’s not a shrub you’re likely to call one of the Sonoran Desert’s most attractive flora — gnarled and hunched, the ironwood lacks both the alien charm of the Joshua tree and the iconic flamboyance of the Saguaro cactus. It makes up for this with its longevity: Some ironwoods growing in the hills east of the Coachella Valley have clung there 400 years longer than California has been a state. Adequately protected, those very same trees could plausibly still be standing for our successors to marvel at in the year 2724 — 175 presidential terms from now.
Who knows if they’ll still talk about President Joe Biden then — in 700 years, he’ll be as deep in the past as Edward II of England is now. But if those ironwood trees are still standing, it could be because of him. Biden has called the fight against climate change the defining cause of his presidency, and he views conservation and the preservation of biodiversity as part and parcel of that legacy. His 30x30 executive order — which aims to set aside 30% of America’s lands and waters for conservation by 2030 — was a week-one priority once he took office.
Among his best remaining opportunities to add to his tally would be the designation of Chuckwalla National Monument, a 660,000-acre stretch of desert south of Joshua Tree National Park that is home to one-fifth of the ironwood trees left in the world. The same goes for a sacred and culturally significant region in the southwest corner of California called Kw’tsán; about Sáttítla, a vulnerable volcanic landscape near Mt. Shasta; about the Owyhee, a million-acre Oregon watershed that sits in the crosshairs of mining and energy development; and about the homestead in Maine that belonged to Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the U.S. cabinet. The list goes on.
But with less than two months until Biden’s move-out day, environmental advocates are starting to wonder whether he’ll ever get around to fulfilling his promise.
“There are still several national monument campaigns that are ready to go and awaiting the president’s signature, and those are the sorts of things that could cement President Biden’s legacy as one of the great conservation presidents of all time — if he takes those steps here in the last few weeks,” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation advocacy group, told me.
When Biden took office in 2021, roughly 293 million acres of the United States fell under the protection of various federal laws, about 12% of his 30% goal. Since then, Biden has set aside another 1%, or 37 million acres, for protection, including about 1.6 million acres of new monuments under the Antiquities Act. So far, Biden has protected slightly less land than President Bill Clinton did in his first term, per the Center for Western Priorities’ accounting. And every day that passes matters; the Center for American Progress has found that the U.S. loses a football field’s worth of natural area every 30 seconds.
Still, conservationists have celebrated Biden’s moves to set aside the National Petroleum Reserve and the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and to expand Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument and San Gabriel Mountains National Monument in California. “When you look at it from a traditional land protection perspective, I think [the Biden administration has] a strong record,” Chris Wood, the president and chief executive officer of the conservation group Trout Unlimited, told me.
And Mustafa Santiago Ali, the executive vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, also told me not to discount Biden’s designation of the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument in Illinois, the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Illinois and Mississippi, and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona, even though they don’t add substantial acreage to his totals. “Folks may not pay attention to how important those monuments are — honoring folks who have sacrificed in the past,” Ali said. Weiss, likewise, commended Biden and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland for “acknowledging that you need Indigenous stewardship to lead and be central to all public land management decisions.”
As the remaining weeks of Biden’s tenure quietly tick by, there is increasing anxiety about whether and when the president will reach for the Antiquities Act again. Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, told me she hopes Biden will announce at least two more national monuments between now and January 20.
Ultimately, though, when it comes to the question of how much land Biden will choose to set aside in the waning days of his administration, “the limiting factor is time,” Ryan Houston, the executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, which has campaigned extensively for the designation of an Owyhee National Monument, told me. “If we don't take action before Inauguration Day in January, then we’re entering at least a two-, four-, or six-year period where there won’t be opportunities to follow through and protect the Owyhee,” Houston went on. “And that sets us back a long way.”
Organizers don’t get a tip-off ahead of time about where or what the Biden administration is considering. Chuckwalla, with its ironwood trees, rare reptiles, cultural sites, and Joshua Tree-adjacent wildlife corridors, seems likely — Haaland visited it this spring, a portentous sign according to advocates. Other would-be monuments like the Owyhee in Oregon are less certain and may attract executive attention only if Congress fails to roll it into a public lands omnibus bill expected by the end of the year.
The clock has already run out for other key components of Biden’s conservation legacy. “In the first month of his presidency, it seemed like it would be great,” Brendan Cummings, the conservation director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focused on endangered species protections, told me. With the president’s 30x30 executive order and his pause on federal fossil fuel leasing, it’d “seemed like he was going to live up to his promises.”
Then came the Willow Project approval, new LNG export terminal sign-offs, and so many new oil and gas permits that Biden surpassed even Trump. “One of the few areas where Biden has actually been excellent is national monuments,” Cummings conceded. “But everything else is sort of this mix of muddled middle or profoundly disappointing.” He added, “Trump took us two steps back, and Biden took us one step forward — so we’re still behind at the end of the day.”
Though the other advocates I spoke with for this story weren’t as sour on Biden’s record as Cummings, many had a wishlist of items they’d hoped Biden would address. Brengel of the NPCA had hoped there’d be more climate resiliency funding for the National Parks, which have “been on the frontlines of dealing with some of the most dramatic effects of climate change.” Wood, at Trout Unlimited, was holding out for the creation of a federal fund to deal with the legacy of abandoned mines via a royalty on hard rock metals, the only commodity produced from public lands that doesn’t have a surcharge or tax. Weiss of Western Priorities wanted to see action on livestock grazing reforms.
It’s hard to feel too frustrated with the Biden administration, though. Much of 2021 and 2022 were spent addressing Trump administration policies and roll-backs, including restoring protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. Biden’s executive powers had their limits, too. While one of his administration’s conservation wins had been blocking the culturally significant lands around New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon from new oil and gas leasing, Trump will have a relatively straightforward path to reopening it to drilling if he so chooses. “I think with the cards that we had in our hands, Deb Haaland and Biden have done everything they could do to protect this area,” Paul F. Reed, a preservation archaeologist with Archaeology Southwest, which campaigned to protect Chaco Canyon, told me. But “short of congressional action, this area will continue to be a political football.” The same may again be true for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
There is better Trump-proofing elsewhere. Jenny Rowland-Shea, the director of public lands at the left-leaning advocacy group the Center for American Progress, told me that for Trump to unwind Biden’s protections in the Arctic, which were established via a lengthier rule-making process, the incoming president would have to prove that the science behind the ecology subsistence isn’t valid — a bigger lift. It’s part of why she feels comfortable calling Biden’s actions in the Arctic one of the more significant pieces of his conservation legacy.
Others pointed to the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, which put conservation on equal footing with other land uses like drilling this past spring, as the real gift that Biden leaves behind. Wood, of Trout Unlimited, told me that what he hopes will outlast the 46th president is Biden’s approach to looking at conservation as a part of natural resiliency, the effort to “make our lands more resistant to floods, fires, and drought.” Meanwhile, Ali of NWF told me his wish is that future presidents will use Biden’s accomplishments as a “north star” to measure themselves against and surpass.
But Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity believes there is only one way for Biden to cement his legacy in the remaining weeks he has in office. “Almost everything the president does gets forgotten,” he said. “But the land that a president protects is forever.”
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Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 28 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.