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We’re worse off than ever — but on a better track.
What a strange time to be thinking about climate change. I can remember few previous moments where the danger of the climate threat was as apparent — or as inescapable.
A massive heat wave has covered much of the Northern Hemisphere, sending temperatures from Beijing to New York to Rome into the 80s or 90s. Phoenix, Arizona, has just recorded — for the first time ever — 19 days in a row with a high above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. On Sunday, a weather station in western China recorded that country’s all-time hottest temperature: 126 degrees Fahrenheit. Wildfires are raging across southern Europe and northern Canada.
Nor is the land alone aflame. The oceans have set an all-time heat record, smashing the previous record set in 2016 and continuing to meander higher. The Atlantic Ocean is particularly stricken: The water near southern Florida, normally in the mid-80s at this time of year, has reached a stunning 98 degrees.
Courtesy of the Climate Change Institute from the University of Maine
But this is only a symptom of a broiling year. Last month was the warmest June ever measured, and 2023 is now more likely than not to be the warmest year ever measured. The nine hottest years on record are now the most recent nine years. If 2023 sets the all-time record, we will go 10 out of 10.
Even the stranger symptoms of climate change are becoming apparent. Scientists have long warned that as the climate warms, the atmosphere will hold more moisture, potentially turning what were once “normal” rain storms — summer thunderstorms that did not originate as a hurricane or tropical storm — into torrential downpours. Well, a series of normal seasonal storms just deluged the Northeast, flooding Vermont’s capital and paralyzing regional travel. On Sunday, six inches of rain fell in less than one hour in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, killing five people. Although these extreme events have not been directly attributed to climate change, they are exactly what climate scientists expect to see more of as global warming continues.
The effects of climate change are becoming unavoidable, omnipresent. In Washington, D.C., where I live, we are locked in a particularly perverse summer pattern where the air will either be extraordinarily hot and humid (because a south wind is blowing) or cooler but filled with toxic wildfire smoke (because a north wind is blowing). There is, in other words, no respite from climate impacts for the next several months: We get extreme heat or dangerous air.
It is shocking, astonishing, almost unreal. The MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes has compared these weeks to the moment in the film Don’t Look Up, when a comet, bound for a collision course with Earth, first appears in the night sky. The thing that we — in the broadest definition of we — were warned about has arrived. It is all the worse for the fact that, in all likelihood, this is one of the chillier summers of the rest of our lives.
And yet — although this may strike some readers as delusion — I will be honest that I am not filled with despair. In all honesty, I felt far worse about our ability to address, deal with, and adapt to climate change last summer. My mood was blackest almost exactly a year ago.
Perhaps you have forgotten. For more than a year, Senator Joe Manchin had been negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer over a capacious spending package called “Build Back Better.” It was a messy and frustrating thing to watch. Manchin could be a fickle negotiator, backing programs one day only to renege the next, but Schumer too sometimes seemed incapable of understanding Manchin’s demands.
Then, on July 15, 2022, Manchin abruptly pulled out of the talks. It seemed like the effort to pass a reconciliation bill had fallen apart. For the third time in as many decades, the Democratic Party — and specifically the Senate — had blown its chance to pass a climate law. The United States would remain the global laggard, if not the antagonist, of the fight against climate change.
And I despaired. Even though I had reported on climate change for eight years, the outlook then seemed worse than during any moment of the Trump administration. At least during that farce of a four-year term, one could point to hopeful signs in the real economy — like the rapid growth and falling cost of renewables — and wonder if decarbonization might eventually win the day.
But Manchin’s betrayal was an irreversible defeat, one that would condemn the United States to a backwater and retrograde role in the global energy system. China and the European Union, it seemed to me, were now set to dominate the renewable and electric vehicle industries while their American competitors fell behind. As an American who wished to see his country play a positive role in the climate fight, that mortified me; as an American who had to live in the United States, it scared me. Oil and gas companies would now deepen their influence over national politics, I feared, turning America into the world’s most powerful petrostate. Manchin, almost single-handedly, had set back the global climate fight almost a decade and locked in millions of tons of dangerous, wasteful carbon pollution.
And then a miracle happened — one so familiar to us now that perhaps we have forgotten how astonishing it seemed at the time. In those final weeks of July, Manchin — motivated, perhaps, by the wave of popular revulsion that greeted his initial withdrawal — had secretly restarted negotiations with Schumer. On July 27, the two men unveiled a new deal on climate, healthcare, and taxes. The ever-canny Manchin christened it “the Inflation Reduction Act.”
More miracles, now. The Senate — the long-standing enemy of global climate policy, the legislative body that had euthanized climate bills in the 1990s and 2010s — quickly passed the IRA. The House of Representatives galloped behind it. Biden signed it into law. And suddenly, for the first time in my life, the United States had something approaching a climate policy.
As the one-year anniversary of the IRA approaches, we’re going to see many reflections on how the law is going. (I’ve already written one.) Is the IRA working?, we’ll ask. Will it decarbonize the economy fast enough? What other policy do we need?
Those are crucial questions — and questions that this publication was founded to cover. But I hope we can remember how astonishing it is that the IRA exists at all. In November 2016, in March 2020, in November 2021 — even in July 2022 — I was not certain that America would ever pass a climate law.
From 1990 to 2022, the defining and unavoidable fact of American climate policy was that it barely existed. That is — somewhat unbelievably to me — no longer the case. It cedes neither perfection to the IRA nor improper deference to the Biden administration to say that it is okay to feel pretty good about that. Progress is possible. The one sure thing about the status quo is that it will change.
And it will change again. In the coming years, America will discover what much of the world already knows, which is that decarbonization is an extraordinarily difficult task. It will be grueling as a political question, as a policy question, as economics, as engineering, as techne. Meticulous mineral, industrial, and agricultural supply chains must be spun up at the same time that others — primarily the fossil-fuel industry, but also the global steel and cement complex that breeds humanity’s environment — must be profoundly reformed or shut down.
And climate change’s impacts — many times worse than this summer’s — will keep afflicting us. Scientists have warned for 20 years about the “hockey stick” rise of global temperatures, but as the writer Tim Sahay has put it, we are about to get whacked by that hockey stick, over and over and over again. It will hurt. Future political ruptures and defeats are coming, too, perhaps even more dreadful and deadly than those of the 2000s or 2010s.
But when and if those calamities surround us, I will want to remember that progress is possible, and that we can be as astonished by grace and rescue as by anguish and peril. Years ago, I read about a newspaper headline that announced the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg. “TREMENDOUS VICTORY IN PENNSYLVANIA,” it said, and then, below: “Reverent Gratitude of the People.” Reverent gratitude — not a phrase that climate writers use too often, and not one that I would ever use to describe a politician. But when and if humanity triumphs over climate change, and brings our little biosphere into a peaceful and teeming bounty, I do think we will feel a reverent gratitude — for what we will have learned, for what we will have done, and for what we will have averted. And on that day, a billion anonymous heroes will have helped secure that victory, and a trillion contingencies will have whispered it into being.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the day is searing and the rains are agonizing. The way before us is long and darkening. If you find yourself surprised by gratitude, hold fast to it.
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A conversation with Jillian Blanchard of Lawyers for Good Government about the heightened cost of permitting delays
This week I chatted with Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice with Lawyers for Good Government, an organization that has been supporting beneficiaries of the Inflation Reduction Act navigate the uncertainties surrounding tax credits and grant programs under the Trump administration. The reason I wanted to chat with Jillian is simple: the IRA is under threat for the first time under a Republican Congress. I wanted to understand how solar and wind projects could be impacted by the House Republican reconciliation bill and putting IRA tax credits in doubt. I learned a lot.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay, Jillian, what’s the topline here? How would the GOP reconciliation bill impact individual projects’ development?
There are big chunks of the reconciliation bill that will have dramatic impacts on project development, including language that would repeal or phase out bipartisan and popular tax credits in a way that would make it very, very difficult to invest in projects. I can get into the weeds next.
But it’s worth saying first – the group of programs aside from tax credits that [House Republicans] would repeal represents every single part of America. Hundreds of projects that will not go forward if these programs are not going well. And they have several legally obligated grants that EPA has already mucked up in a litany of ways. But what they’re proposing to do is to pull the rug out from under those programs. On top of that they want to pull any unobligated funding out.
I think it’s extremely misrepresentative to say these are not big cuts. They’re significant cuts to clean air and clean water across the board.
Help me get into the weeds about how phasing out the credits will make it harder to invest in a project.
Right now, a bank might want to invest a certain amount of money in a clean energy project because they know on the back end they can get 30% or 40% back on their investment. A return through tax credits. They can bank on that, because tax credits are a guarantee.
Was that an intentional pun? “Bank”?
Yeah, it is. I love a good pun. You opened the floodgates, that was a mistake.
But anyway, the program itself was supposed to be around until at least 2032 and the bank could bank on those tax credits. That’s a big runway, because projects could get delayed and you could lock in the credit as soon as you started construction.
Now they’re doing a phase-out approach where if your project is not placed into service before a certain date, you don’t avoid the phase out. You don’t get any protections if you’re starting your project now or next year. It has to be placed in service before 2028 or else your project may not be eligible. You are constructing it, you are financing it, but then through no fault of your own – a storm or whatever – then suddenly that project is no longer entitled to get 30% or 40% back.
That’s a big risk. And banks don’t like risk.
Opposition on the ground also delays projects the way a storm does. Would this empower those opponents?
Oh, totally. Totally. If anyone wants to fight a project, a bank might be even less likely to invest in it. The NIMBYs for that particular project become a risk.
What would you tell a developer at this moment who is wondering about the uncertainty around the IRA?
I would tell them that now is the time to speak up. If they want to stay in this business and make sure their energy stays as low-cost as it already is, they need to speak up right now, no matter what their political party affiliation is. Make it clear solar isn’t going away, wind isn’t going away, storage isn’t going away. These are markets America needs to be competitive with the rest of the world.
Investors are only just now starting to digest what the proposed cuts will mean, especially for energy storage.
Is Wall Street too sanguine about the House of Representatives’ proposal to gut the Inflation Reduction Act? When the House Ways and Means Committee unveiled its language on the law on Monday — phasing out tax credits, implementing strict restrictions on business relationships with Chinese companies, and altering when projects are eligible for credits — some investors responded to the cutbacks by driving up the prices of some clean energy stocks.
The residential solar company Sunrun traded up on Tuesday by 8.6%, and the American solar manufacturer First Solar was up over 22%. (Stock movements on Monday were largely in response to the pause of the U.S.-China trade war, also announced that morning.)
“The early drafts of a Republican tax and spending bill weren’t as bad for renewables as feared,” wrote Barron’s. Morgan Stanley analysts used the same language — “not as bad as feared” — in a note to clients on the text. “Industry was bracing for way worse,” Don Schneider, the deputy head of public policy for Piper Sandler and a former Republican staffer on the Ways and Means Committee, wrote on X.
While many analysts — and, to be honest, journalists at Heatmap — have issued dire warnings about how the various provisions of the Ways and Means language could together make much of the IRA essentially impossible to use, even before the tax credits phase out, investors on Wall Street and in Washington seem to have shrugged them off. Some level of cutting was all but inevitable, and “not as bad as it could have been” is reason enough to celebrate — plus there’s also “it’ll probably change, anyway.”
There’s something to this. A group ofmoderate Republicans criticized the language on Wednesday as too restrictive, specifically citing changes to three overarching features of the tax credits: when projects would be eligible for tax credits, where companies are able to source components and materials, and whether companies are allowed to freely buy and sell tax credits generated by their projects. (Wouldn’t you know it, these complaints largely echo what Heatmap has written in the past few days.)
In the Senate, meanwhile, Republican Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, said that the text as written would be too damaging to advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal generation. The phase-out timelines in the Ways and Means language are “too short for truly new technologies,” Cramer told Politico.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me that he expects the bill to evolve in a way to meet the concerns of Senate Republicans like Cramer.
“Given considerations both political and procedural, like the more flexible reconciliation instructions Senate Finance is afforded relative to House Ways and Means and the disproportionate impact current text entails for technologies Republicans traditionally favor, like nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower, I think it’s fair to say that this text will change over the coming weeks,” he said.
Finally, days after the Ways and Means committee made its thinking public, Wall Street seems to be catching on to the implications. The new foreign entities of concern rules pose a particularly huge danger to the renewable energy sector, according to Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith, and especially to energy storage, which would be the key provider of reliability on a renewable-heavy grid. Energy storage looks to account for almost 30% of new generator additions this year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
“We think the market got it wrong for storage,” Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients. The market has yet to “digest and fully interpret the implications of proposed tariff and tax policy, which as currently written do not bode well for storage,” he said. The foreign sourcing language “is more restrictive than initially thought, with some industry stakeholders calling the proposal a near repeal on IRA.”
The storage supply chain is intensely entangled with China. Many companies, including Tesla,have been forced to disclose to investors just how reliant they are on China for their storage businesses.
China alone accounted for 70% of battery imports in 2024, according to industry analysts at BloombergNEF, over $14 billion worth. About a quarter of the metals used in battery manufacturing — especially graphite — came from China, BNEF figures show. For specific battery chemistry like lithium iron phosphate, which is popular for stationary storage products, the supply chain is essentially 100% Chinese.
Wall Street revenue and profit estimates “do not adequately capture the extent of risks” facing the U.S. storage industry, Dumoulin-Smith wrote. The storage company Fluence’s stock fell around 1.5% today, and is down over 5.5% since close of trading on Monday, as the market began to digest the House language.
It is possible that the foreign sourcing rules will be loosened and phase-outs for tax credits and transferability lengthened, Venkatakrishnan told me, but not in a way that would endanger the overall structure of the bill. Cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act are a key source of revenue for the Republican bill-writers to ensure as many of the tax cuts they want can fit within the budgetary scope they’ve given themselves.
“Any adjustments will be made with an eye toward ensuring budgetary offsets are sufficient to enable success of the broader enterprise,” Venkatakrishnan said. In other words, as much as some lawmakers may want to see these tax credits preserved, ultimately, they’ve got to pass a bill to ensure Trump’s tax cuts stick around.
And more of the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. St. Lawrence County, New York – It’s hard out here for a 2-megawatt solar project in upstate New York.
2. McKean County, Pennsylvania – Swift Current Energy is now dealing with an insurgent opposition campaign against its Black Cherry wind project.
3. Blair County, Pennsylvania – Good news is elsewhere in Pennsylvania though as this county has given the go-ahead for a new utility-scale Ampliform solar project, the BL Hileman Hollow Solar project.
4. Allen County, Ohio – The mayor of Lima, a small city in this county, is publicly calling on Ohio senators to make sure that the pending reconciliation bill in Congress ensures Inflation Reduction Act tax credits can still apply to municipalities.
5. Vanderburgh County, Indiana – Orion Energy’s Blue Grass Creek solar project is now facing opposition too, with Orion representatives telling local press they actually expected some locals to be against the project.
6. Otsego County, Michigan – That state forest-felling solar farm that Fox News loved to hate? That idea is no more.
7. Adams County, Illinois – The Green Key solar project we’ve been following in the town of Ursa has received its special use permit from the county after vociferous local opposition.
8. Dane County, Wisconsin – We’re getting a taste of local worry about how the GOP’s efforts to change the IRA could affect municipal energy planning, thanks to the village of Waukanee.
9. Olmsted County, Minnesota – The fight over Ranger Power’s Lemon Hill solar project is evolving into a nascent bid to give localities more control over permitting renewables projects.
10. Cherry County, Nebraska – This county is seeking an investigation into whether Sandhills Energy’s BSH Kilgore wind farm is violating zoning standards after receiving requests from residents who are against the project.
11. Albany County, Wyoming – Bird conservation activists fighting wind projects in Wyoming claim the Interior Department is providing them incomplete information under the Freedom of Information Act about wind turbines and eagle deaths.
12. Santa Fe County, New Mexico – Renowned climate activist Bill McKibben is publicly going on the attack against opponents of an individual solar project, the AES Rancho Viejo solar farm near Santa Fe.
13. Apache County, Arizona – Opponents of the Repsol Lava Run wind project are now rallying around trying to stop transmission for the project.
14. Klickitat County, Washington – The Cypress Creek Renewables solar project we told you last week got fast-tracked by the state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council? Turns out the county had a moratorium on new solar and anticipated a chance to formally file public comments before that would happen.