Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

Canada’s Election Goes Light on Climate Policy

On campaigns, clean energy manufacturing, and the IEA

Canada’s Election Goes Light on Climate Policy
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Lisbon and “most of Spain” are without power due to a massive blackoutDubai residents are being told to limit outdoor activity today as temperatures could hit 108 degrees FahrenheitMonday will be “one of the most active days of severe weather so far this season” in the U.S., with meteorologists issuing a rare “high risk” warning for intense storms and destructive tornadoes across the Upper Midwest.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Canada’s election, light on climate, culminates today

It’s Election Day in Canada, where Liberal Party leader Mark Carney holds a modest lead against the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre — a “stunning reversal” from late last year, when Conservatives had a 20-point lead in the national polls. But that was before President Trump’s tariffs and comments about annexing the country.

The election has been a stunning reversal in other ways, as well: In 2021, “the environment topped the list of voter concerns,” the BBC notes, and “there was a consensus between the two major parties that Canada should rapidly transition to a green economy.” But climate change has not been a central talking point of the 2025 campaigns, even for Carney, a former special envoy on climate action and finance to the United Nations.

Instead, Carney cut the country’s carbon tax on his first day as prime minister following Justin Trudeau’s resignation, and he has vowed to make Canada a “leading energy superpower” by expanding oil and gas production along with renewable energy and carbon capture and storage technology. Poilievre, a proponent of significantly expanding the nation’s oil and gas industries, has argued that “technology, not taxes, is the best way to fight climate change and protect our environment.” The winner is expected to be announced Monday night or early Tuesday morning.

2. Clean energy manufacturing investments declined in Q1 for the first time since the passage of the IRA

Clean energy manufacturing fell in the first quarter of 2025, marking “the first decline since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed in 2022,” Barron’s writes based on a new report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rhodium Group. While clean manufacturing has more than tripled, from $2.5 billion at the end of 2022 to $14 billion in the first quarter of 2025, the surge has been driven primarily by the electric vehicle supply chain. In the first three months of the year, six manufacturing projects worth $6.9 billion in investment were canceled, representing “the highest value of cancellations on record,” while $2.1 billion in earlier-stage investments were also canceled. “Among the companies that changed their plans were T1 Energy, formerly known as Freyr Battery; Kore Power; and the electric-vehicle start-ups Nikola and Canoo,” Barron’s notes, with the report crediting some of the turbulence to the fact that the sector “faces rising headwinds from tariff escalations, an uncertain federal policy outlook, and macroeconomic pressures.”

3. Trump admin pressures IEA to drop focus on net zero

The Trump administration is pressuring the International Energy Agency to “cease its work promoting the global shift to clean power and net-zero carbon emissions,” Politico reports. During the organization’s conference in London last week, attendees largely championed “an exciting vision of energy security and abundance from cheap, homegrown low-carbon power,” in the words of the UK’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. The U.S. acting assistant secretary of energy for international affairs, Tommy Joyce, took a different view, however, bashing net-zero policies that, he said, “harm human lives.”

Republicans have been calling for years for the U.S. to “come up with a strategy to replace leadership at the IEA,” and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice President JD Vance have pushed similar “energy dominance” narratives in their own recent international meetings. But despite what a European official described to Politico as the U.S.’s evident intention to “weaken or disable the IEA unless they’re working on our values,” a French official told reporters that “decarbonization is both an objective and a tool” of energy security and “we have no fear that the IEA will change its position.”

4. BYD doubled its net profit in Q1

Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD doubled its net profit since last year, from 4.6 billion yuan to 9.2 billion yuan (about $1.3 billion), the company reported in its first-quarter earnings on Friday. The automaker also announced that its revenue increased 36% year-over-year, with total sales of EVs and hybrids rising 60% to over a million units. The earnings stand in stark contrast to Tesla’s Q1 results, which saw profits fall 71% over the first three months of the year. BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s top EV seller in 2024, and The Wall Street Journal notes that it “appears relatively insulated from the U.S. tariffs on the auto sector, having long prioritized other international markets.” You can learn more about how BYD became “the most important car company most Americans have still never heard of” by listening to this episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.

5. xAI is ‘perpetuating environmental racism,’ Memphis residents say

More than 200 people gathered in South Memphis on Friday night to voice their concerns about the use of gas turbines to power the supercomputer facility of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports. “We deserve clean air, and our lungs are not for sale to xAI or Elon Musk,” Democratic state Representative Justin J. Pearson said at the event.

Earlier this month, the Southern Environmental Law Center announced that it had obtained aerial images showing that the Memphis xAI facility was using at least 35 portable methane gas turbines without air permits to power its supercomputer — despite Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s claims that “only 15” were turned on while the permitting was pending. KeShaun Pearson, the president of Memphis Community Against Pollution, slammed xAI over “perpetuating environmental racism” with the illegal generators, since methane emissions have been linked to serious health problems like asthma and certain cancers. The public comment period for the plant’s operations permit for 15 gas turbines closes on April 30.

THE KICKER

Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images

The three-year-old activist group Just Stop Oil held its final protest in London this weekend, claiming it has achieved its goal of halting the United Kingdom’s extraction of oil and gas following the Labour Party’s suspension of new exploration licenses in the North Sea in March.

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Politics

Can Offshore Wind Survive the Tax Credit Purge?

Empire Wind has been spared — but it may be one of the last of its kind in the U.S.

Sharks circling a wind turbine.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

It’s been a week of whiplash for offshore wind.

On Monday, President Trump lifted his stop work order on Empire Wind, an 810-megawatt wind farm under construction south of Long Island that will deliver renewable power into New York’s grid. But by Thursday morning, Republicans in the House of Representatives had passed a budget bill that would scrap the subsidies that make projects like this possible.

Keep reading...Show less
Politics

Carbon Capture May Not Have Been Spared After All

The House budget bill may have kept the 45Q tax credit, but nixing transferability makes it decidedly less useful.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Climeworks

Very few of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits made it through the House’s recently passed budget bill unscathed. One of the apparently lucky ones, however, was the 45Q credit for carbon capture projects. This provides up to $180 per metric ton for direct air capture and $85 for carbon captured from industrial or power facilities, depending on how the CO2 is subsequently sequestered or put to use in products such as low-carbon aviation fuels or building materials. The latest version of the bill doesn’t change that at all.

But while the preservation of 45Q is undoubtedly good news for the increasing number of projects in this space, carbon capture didn’t escape fully intact. One of the main ways the IRA supercharged tax credits was by making them transferable, turning them into an important financing tool for small or early-stage projects that might not make enough money to owe much — or even anything — in taxes. Being able to sell tax credits on the open market has often been the only way for smaller developers to take advantage of the credits. Now, the House bill will eliminate transferability for all projects that begin construction two years after the bill becomes law.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Politics

The GOP Tax Bill Is a Dangerous Gamble at a Precarious Moment

House Republicans have bet that nothing bad will happen to America’s economic position or energy supply. The evidence suggests that’s a big risk.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When President Barack Obama signed the Budget Control Act in August of 2011, he did not do so happily. The bill averted the debt ceiling crisis that had threatened to derail his presidency, but it did so at a high cost: It forced Congress either to agree to big near-term deficit cuts, or to accept strict spending limits over the years to come.

It was, as Bloomberg commentator Conor Sen put it this week, the wrong bill for the wrong moment. It suppressed federal spending as America climbed out of the Great Recession, making the early 2010s economic recovery longer than it would have been otherwise. When Trump came into office, he ended the automatic spending limits — and helped to usher in the best labor market that America has seen since the 1990s.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow