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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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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
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.