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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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While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.
It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.
Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.
But for clean energy and environmental advocates, the Naperville city council results represent an encouraging, if overlooked, victory. On Tuesday, voters in the suburb elected four candidates — incumbents Benjamin White and Ian Holzhauer, and newcomers Mary Gibson and Ashfaq Syed — all of whom oppose the city signing a new contract with the Prairie State Generating Station, the state’s largest and youngest coal-fired plant and the seventh-dirtiest electricity provider in the country.
Naperville is one of 30 municipal investors in the Prairie State plant whose contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a public power agency and one of the nine partial owners of Prairie State, has it locked into coal through 2035. Recently, IMEA approached the municipal investors with the promise of favorable terms on a new contract if the cities and towns were willing to re-sign a decade early — by April 30 — and commit to another 20 years of coal power. Most municipalities took the deal, which will run through 2055; Naperville, along with the towns of St. Charles and Winnetka, are still debating the decision, with the deadline looming.
“IMEA’s proposition for communities is, ‘Hey, instead of paying Wall Street and shareholder dividends, we don’t have any of that because we’re a nonprofit, so you get lower energy costs,’” Fernando Arriola, the community relations chair for Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, which opposes the deal with IMEA, told me. “But the way I look at it is, it’s a deal with the devil because you’re locked in for 30 years. And it’s like Hotel California — you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
In a statement to Heatmap, Staci Wilson, the vice president of government affairs and member services at IMEA, told me that the contract it offered to Naperville is “designed to help … secure more future green resources to serve our member communities for the long term. IMEA is the only power supplier to allow the city to have a direct voice in procuring their wholesale power supply and make reliable, economical, and sustainable resource decisions for the future.”
While it’s true that IMEA allows its municipal members a voice in its future planning, those in Naperville who oppose the new contract point out that the community has just one vote in the process despite making up 35% of the utility’s market.
The pending contract decision became one of the major themes of the city council race in Naperville — attention that caused some locals to grumble about the injection of partisan politics and outside interest in the campaigns. But Syed, a newly elected city council member and a recent immigrant from Dubai, told me that learning that his city relied on coal for 80% of its energy needs was what ultimately galvanized him into running. “Naperville has been a leader in many things, but in this area, we were not doing good,” he said. “So I stepped up.”
Illinois has one of the nation’s most aggressive decarbonization timelines, requiring coal and gas plants to close by 2030. But there is a carve-out for plants owned by public entities like municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, and Prairie State fits that bill. Instead, the power plant has to reduce emissions by 45% by 2038, a goal IMEA says it can reach by installing multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage technologies. Energy experts have been widely skeptical of the proposal. “The people I’ve talked to say that’s unproven and it doesn’t necessarily work, and it’s a high price,” Arriola said.
Still, cost concerns related to transitioning away from coal had “definitely been a conversation in town” leading up to Tuesday’s election, Arriola told me. “A lot of people are seriously concerned about pricing, and there are also concerns about the reliability.” Syed told me that was one of the objections he heard the most when talking to constituents during his campaign. “Some of the Republicans who were against [exporing alternative energy options] were trying to influence people, saying we need to think about the cost,” he said. “My standard answer to these people was that I am not going to compromise clean energy just for the cost purpose.”
Perhaps most interestingly, unlike many communities that oppose power plants, Naperville is located almost 300 miles north of the Prairie State Generating Station and is unaffected by its immediate pollution. Naperville voters who opposed renewing the contract did so on the merits of finding cleaner energy sources and on the objection to dirty electricity that is otherwise out of sight and out of mind. As Amanda Pankau, the director of energy and community resiliency at the Prairie Rivers Network, an environmental nonprofit in the state, told me, “From a climate perspective, we should all care about the Prairie State coal plant.” She noted that the emissions from the plant — around 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — are “impacting every single Illinoisan and every single person that lives on planet Earth.”
Despite those existential stakes, it could be tempting to wave away the results in Naperville as being on trend for a relatively affluent and liberal-leaning town. Compared to the Wisconsin supreme court election, where the Democrat-backed candidate overcame enormous spending margins to trounce her Republican-backed opponent, it does not necessarily indicate the same momentum for the party heading into 2026’s midterms. (Nor does it even have the biggest climate-related election headline of the night: Tesla is suing Wisconsin for a law preventing car manufacturers from owning car dealerships, which the state’s high court will likely decide.)
But at a time of little good news in the climate sphere, the Naperville election is an encouraging and invigorating reminder that there are candidates who believe in cleaner technologies, and that the battles can still — or especially — be won at the local level. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the IMEA contract we signed for that time was okay,” Syed said. “But it’s not okay today. We cannot have this $2 billion contract until 2055 because the next generation will ask us this question: ‘What have you people done for us this time?’”
The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.