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A new Nature paper outlines the relationship between rising temperatures and the literal rotation of the Earth.
Thinking too hard about time is a little like thinking too hard about blinking; it seems natural and intuitive until suddenly you’re sweating and it makes no sense at all. At least, that’s how I felt when I came across an incredible new study published in Nature this afternoon by Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, suggesting that climate change might be affecting global timekeeping.
Our internationally agreed-upon clock, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), consists of two components: the one you’re familiar with, which is the complete rotation of the Earth around its axis, as well as the average taken from 400 atomic clocks around the world. Since the 1970s, UTC has added 27 leap seconds at irregular intervals to keep pace with atomic clocks as the Earth’s rotation has gradually slowed. Then that rotation started to speed up in 2016; June 29, 2022, set a record for the planet’s shortest day, with the Earth completing a full rotation 1.59 milliseconds short of 24 hours. Timekeepers anticipated at that point that we’d need our first-ever negative leap second around 2026 to account for the acceleration.
But such a model doesn’t properly account for the transformative changes the planet is undergoing due to climate change — specifically, the billions of tons of ice melting from Greenland and Antarctica every year.
Using mathematical modeling, Agnew found that the melt-off, as measured by gravity-tracking satellites, has again decreased the Earth’s angular velocity to the extent that a negative leap second will actually be required three years later than estimates, in 2029.
While a second here or there might not seem like much on a cosmic scale, as Agnew explained to me, these kinds of discrepancies throw into question the entire idea of basing our time system on the physical position of the Earth. Even more mind-bogglingly, Agnew’s modeling makes the astonishing case that so long as it is, climate change will be “inextricably linked” to global timekeeping.
Confused? So was I, until Agnew talked me through his research. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did you get involved in researching this? I’d never have expected there to be a relationship between climate change and timekeeping.
Pure accident. I’m a geophysicist and I have an avocational interest in timekeeping, so I know all about leap seconds and the history of atomic clocks. I thought about writing a paper figuring out statistically what the next century would bring in terms of leap seconds.
When I started working on the paper, I realized there was a signal that I needed to allow for, which was the change induced by melting ice — which has been studied, there are plenty of papers on this satellite gravity signal. But nobody has, as far as I can tell, related it to rotation. Mostly because, from a geophysical standpoint, that’s not very interesting.
Interesting. Or, well, I guess not interesting.
I mean, there is geophysical literature on this, but it’s largely, Okay, we see this signal, and gravity doesn’t mesh with what we think we know about ice melt. Does it measure what we think we know about sea level change? How does the geophysics all fit together? And the fact that it changes Earth’s rotation is kind of a side issue.
I did not know about this when I got started on this project; it appeared as I was working on it. I thought, “Wait, I need to allow for this.” And when I did, it produced the — I don’t want to use the words “more important” because of the climate change part, but it produced a secondary result, which was that this potential for a negative leap second became clear.
Walk me through how the ice melting at the poles changes the Earth’s rotation.
This is the part that’s easy to explain. Ice melts. A lot of water that used to be at the poles is now distributed all over the ocean. Some of it is close to the equator. The standard picture for what’s called change of angular velocity because of moment of inertia — ignore all the verbiage — but the standard picture is of an ice skater who is spinning. She has her arms over her head. When she puts her arms out, she will slow down — like the water going from the poles to the equator. And that’s it. This is the simple part of the problem.
So what’s the hard part?
The hard part is explaining the part about the Earth’s core. If you have two things that are connected to each other and rotating and one of them slows down, the other one has to speed up. I have not been able to think of an ice skater-like-metaphor to go with that, but the simple one is if you were to put a bowl of water on a lazy Susan and you spin the bowl, then the water will start to spin. It won’t spin initially, but then it will start.
If you started stirring the water in the other direction, that would slow the Lazy Susan down. And that’s the interaction between the core and the solid part of the Earth.
And is that causing the negative leap second to move back three years?
That’s why the leap second might happen at all. On a very long timescale, what’s happening is that the tides are slowing the Earth down. The Earth being slower than an atomic clock means that you need a positive leap second every so often. That was the case in 1972, when they started using leap seconds. The assumption was that the Earth would just keep slowing down and so there would be more positive leap seconds over time.
Instead, the Earth has sped up, entirely because of the core, and that’s not something that people necessarily anticipated. When you take the effect of melting ice out, it becomes clear there’s this steady deceleration of the core; the core is rotating more and more slowly. If you extrapolate that — which is a somewhat risky thing to do, you can’t really predict what the core is going to do — then you discover that there is a leap second, in 2029. The ice melting is going in the other direction; if the ice melting hadn’t occurred, then the leap second would come even earlier. Is this all making sense?
I think I’m grasping it.
Just so you know, one of the two reviewers of this paper was someone in geophysics who said, “I know all this stuff. I wasn’t familiar with the rotation part. This paper has an awful lot of moving parts.”
So, it’s just a difference of a second. Why does this even matter?
We are all familiar with the problem of not being synchronized — we just went through it. If you forget that we did Daylight Savings Time, then you’re an hour off from everybody else and it’s bewildering and a nuisance.
Same problem with leap seconds, except for us, a second is not a big deal. For a computer network, though, a second is a big deal. And why is that? Well, for example, in the United States, the rules for stock markets say that everything that is done has to be accurately timed to a 20th of a second. In Europe, it’s actually to the nearest 1,000th of a second. If we were all just farmers or something, it wouldn’t be a problem, but there’s this whole infrastructure that’s invisible to us that tells our phones what time it is, and allows GPS to work, and everything else.
The easiest thing to do would be to not have a negative leap second. Indeed, there are plans not to have leap seconds anymore because for computer networks, they’re an enormous problem. They arrive at irregular intervals; some human being has to put the information into the computer; the computer has to have a program that tells it when the leap seconds are; and most computer programs can’t tell whether it’s a plus or minus second because there’s never been a minus before. From the computer network standpoint, it would be simplest to just not do this.
So, you ask, why are we doing this? In 1972, when leap seconds were instituted, there were two communities that cared about precise time. One was the people who cared about the frequency of your radio station and other kinds of telecommunications. They wanted to use atomic clocks with frequencies that didn’t change, but that didn’t mesh with what the Earth was doing.
Who cares about time telling you how the Earth is rotating? Well, the answer then was that there were people who used the stars for celestial navigation. Back then, celestial navigation was used not just for ships, but for airplanes — if you flew across the ocean, there was a guy in the cockpit, an actual navigator, who would use a periscope to look at the stars and locate the plane, if only as sort of a backup system. That community is now gone. Almost nobody uses celestial navigation as a primary, or even a secondary, way of finding out where they are anymore because of GPS.
My own personal view — and I can warn you, there’s a huge amount of dispute about this — is that we’d be fine if we just stopped having leap seconds at all.
Is there a … governing body of time? That forces us to do leap seconds?
There’s a giant tangle of international organizations that deal with this, but the rules were set by the people in charge of keeping radio stations aligned because radio broadcasts were how time signals were distributed back in 1972. So the rule was created. Who makes that decision is something called the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, which uses astronomy to monitor what the Earth is doing. They can predict a little bit in advance where things are going to be, and if within six months things are going to be more than half a second out, they will announce there will be a leap second.
Back to climate change: It seems pretty amazing that something like melting ice can throw things off so much.
All the stuff about negative seconds is important, but it’s only important because of this infrastructure, because we have all these rules. Strip all of that away and the most important result becomes the fact that climate change has caused an amount of ice melt that is enough to change the rotation rate of the entire Earth in a way that’s visible.
How do you talk to people about the gigatons of ice that Greenland loses every year? Do you talk about “water that could cover the entire United States to the depth of X” to get it into people’s minds? Yes, these are small changes in the rotation rate, but just the fact that we can say, “Look, this is slowing down the entire Earth” seems like another way of saying that climate change is unprecedented and important.
How do we proceed, then, if climate change is messing with our system?
There was a lot of resistance to even introducing atomic time. Time was thought of as being about Earth’s rotation and the astronomers didn’t want to give it up. In fact, in the 19th century, observatories would make money by selling time signals to the rest of the community. Then, in the 1950s, the physicists showed up, ran atomic clocks, never looked at the stars, and said, “We can do time better.” The physicists were right. But it took the astronomical community a while to come around to accepting that was how time was going to be defined.
If we get rid of leap seconds then we’d really have cut the connection between the way in which human beings have always thought of time as being, say, from noon to noon, or from sunrise to sunset, and we’d be replacing it with some bunch of guys in a laboratory somewhere running a machine. For some people, it’s very troubling to think of severing the keeping of time from the Earth’s rotation.
You lose a bit of the romance, I think. But clearly, tying our way of describing the linear passage of sequential events to the Earth’s rotation is going to be messy.
Exactly right. There’s a quote from, of all people, St. Augustine, saying, “I know what time is, but if somebody asked me, I can’t tell them.”
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On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
And how ordinary Americans will pay the price.
No one seems to know exactly how many employees have been laid off from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or, for that matter, what offices those employees worked at, what jobs they held, or what regions of the country will be impacted by their absence. We do know that it was a lot of people; about 10% of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at the agency have left since Donald Trump took office, either because they were among the 800 or so probationary employees to be fired late last month or because they resigned.
“I don’t have the specifics as to which offices, or how many people from specific geographic areas, but I will reiterate that every one of the six [NOAA] line offices and 11 of the staff offices — think of the General Counsel’s Office or the Legislative Affairs Office — all 11 of those staff offices have suffered terminations,” Rick Spinrad, who served as the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told reporters in a late February press call. (At least a few of the NOAA employees who were laid off have since been brought back.)
Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in recent comments about the NOAA layoffs, “This is going to have profound negative consequences on the day-to-day lives of Americans.” He added, “This is something that [Elon Musk’s government efficiency team] just doesn’t even understand. They simply have no idea what they are doing and how it’s hurting people.”
There is the direct harm to hard-working employees who have lost their jobs, of course. But there is also a more existential problem: Part of what is driving the layoffs is a belief by those in power that the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” according to the Project 2025 playbook. As one recently fired NOAA employee put it, “the goal is destruction,” and climate science is one of the explicit targets.
NOAA is a multifaceted organization, and monitoring climate change is far from its only responsibility. The agency researches, protects, and restores America’s fisheries, including through an enforcement arm that combats poaching; it explores the deep ocean and governs seabed mining; and its Commissioned Officer Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, alongside the Army, Marines Corps, and Coast Guard. But many of its well-known responsibilities almost inevitably touch climate change, from the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts and warnings to drought tools for farmers to heat forecasts from the National Weather Service issued on hot summer days. Cutting climate science out of NOAA would have immediate — and in some cases, deadly — impacts on regular Americans.
And it’s likely this is only the beginning of the purge. Project 2025 calls for the complete disbanding of NOAA. Current agency employees have reportedly been told to brace for “a 50% reduction in staff” as part of Elon Musk’s government efficiency campaign. Another 1,000 terminations are expected this week, bringing the total loss at NOAA to around 20% of its staff.
Here are just a few of the ways those layoffs are already impacting climate science.
NOAA collects more than 20 terabytes of environmental data from Earth and space daily, and through its paleoclimatology arm, it has reconstructed climate data going back 100 million years. Not even Project 2025 calls for the U.S. to halt its weather measurements entirely; in fact, Congress requires the collection of a lot of standard climate data.
But the NOAA layoffs are hampering those data collection efforts, introducing gaps and inconsistencies. For example, staffing shortages have resulted in the National Weather Service suspending weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska — and elsewhere — “indefinitely.” The Trump administration is also considering shuttering a number of government offices, including several of NOAA’s weather monitoring stations. Repairs of monitors and sensors could also be delayed by staff cuts and funding shortfalls — or not done at all.
Flawed and incomplete data results in degraded and imprecise forecasts. In an era of extreme weather, the difference of a few miles or degrees can be a matter of life or death.
In the case of climate science specifically, which looks at changes over much longer timescales than meteorology, “I think you could do science with the data we have now, if we can preserve it,” Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at Cornell University who uses NOAA data in his research, told me.
But therein lies the next problem: the threat that the government could take NOAA climate data down entirely.
Though data collection is in many cases mandated by Congress, Congress does not require that the public have access to that data. Though NOAA’s climate page is still live, the Environmental Protection Agency has already removed from its website the Keeling Curve tracker, the daily global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurement that Drilled notes is “one of the longest-running data projects in climate science.” Many other government websites that reference climate change have also gone dark. Solutions are complicated — “downloading” NOAA to preserve it, for example, would cost an estimated $500,000 in storage per month for an institution to host it.
“At the end of the day, if you’re a municipality or a community and you realize that some of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, you’ll want to adapt to it, whether you think it’s because of climate change or not,” Lehner said. “People want to have the best available science to adapt, and I think that applies to Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of communities across the country.” But if the Trump administration deletes NOAA websites, or the existing measurements it’s putting out are of poor quality, “it’s not going to be the best possible science to adapt moving forward,” Lehner added.
I wouldn’t want to be a NOAA scientist with the word “climate” attached to my title or work. The Trump administration has shown itself to be ruthless in eliminating references to words or concepts it opposes, including flagging pictures of the Enola Gay WWII airplane for removal from the Defense Department’s website in an effort to cut all references to the LGBT community from the agency.
“Climate science” is another Trump administration boogey-word, but the NOAA scientists who remain employed by the agency after the layoffs will still have to deal with the realities of a world warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. “Ultimately, what we’re dealing with are changes in our environment that impact ecosystems and humans, and whether you think these changes are driven by humans or not, it’s something that can now be seen in data,” Lehner told me. “From that perspective, I find it hard to believe that this is not something that people [in the government] are interested in researching.”
Government scientists who want to track things like drought or the rapid intensification of hurricanes going forward will likely have to do so without using the word “climate.” Lehner, for example, recalled submitting a proposal to work with the Bureau of Reclamation on the climate change effects on the Colorado River during the first Trump administration and being advised to replace words like “climate change” with more politically neutral language. His team did, and the project ultimately got funded, though Lehner couldn’t say if that was only because of the semantics. It seems likely, though, that Trump 2.0 will be even stricter in CTRL + F’ing “climate” at NOAA and elsewhere.
Climate research will continue in some form at NOAA, if only because that’s the reality of working with data of a warming planet. But scientists who don’t lose their jobs in the layoffs will likely find themselves wasting time on careful doublespeak so as not to attract unwanted attention.
Another major concern with the NOAA layoffs is the loss of expert knowledge. Many NOAA offices were already lean and understaffed, and only one or two employees likely knew how to perform certain tasks or use certain programs. If those experts subsequently lose their jobs, decades of NOAA know-how will be lost entirely.
As one example, late last year, NOAA updated its system to process grants, causing delays as its staff learned how to use the new program. Given the new round of layoffs, the odds are that some of the employees who may have finally figured out how to navigate the new procedure may have been let go. The problem gets even worse when it comes to specialized knowledge.
“Some of the expertise in processing [NOAA’s] data has been abruptly lost,” Lehner told me. “The people who are still there are scrambling to pick up and learn how to process that data so that it can then be used again.”
The worst outcome of the NOAA layoffs, though, is the extensive damage it does to the institution’s future. Some of the brightest, most enthusiastic Americans at NOAA — the probationary employees with under a year of work — are already gone. What’s more, there aren’t likely to be many new openings at the agency for the next generation of talent coming up in high school and college right now.
“We have an atmospheric science program [at Cornell University] where students have secured NOAA internships for this summer and were hoping to have productive careers, for example, at the National Weather Service, and so forth,” Lehner said. “Now, all of this is in question.”
That is hugely detrimental to NOAA’s ability to preserve the institutional knowledge of outgoing or retiring employees, or to build and advance a workforce of the future. It’s impossible to measure how many people ultimately leave the field or decide to pursue a different career because of the changes at NOAA — damage that will not be easily reversed under a new administration. “It’s going to take years for NOAA to recover the trust of the next generation of brilliant environmental scientists and policymakers,” Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, said.
Climate change is a global problem, and NOAA has historically worked with partner agencies around the world to better understand the impacts of the warming planet. Now, however, the Trump administration has ordered NOAA employees to stop their international work, and employees who held roles that involved collaboration with partners abroad could potentially become targets of Musk’s layoffs. Firing those employees would also mean severing their relationships with scientists in international offices — offices that very well could have been in positions to help protect U.S. citizens with their research and data.
As the U.S. continues to isolate itself and the NOAA layoffs continue, there will be cascading consequences for climate science, which is inherently a collaborative field. “When the United States doesn’t lead [on climate science], two things happen,” Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator of NOAA for research, recently told the press. “Other nations relax their own spending in these areas, and the world’s level of understanding starts to decline,” and “countries who we may not have as collegial an understanding with,” such as China, could ostensibly step in and “replace the United States and its leadership.”
That leaves NOAA increasingly alone, and Americans of all political stripes will suffer as a result. “The strategy to erase data and research, to pull the rug from under activism — it’s time-tested,” Lehner, the Cornell climate scientist, said. “But that’s where it’s very infuriating because NOAA’s data is bipartisanly useful.”
Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap senior reporter Jael Holzman.
Donald Trump’s second term has now entered its second month. His administration is doing much to slow down renewables, and everything it can to slow down offshore wind. Jael Holzman is a senior reporter at Heatmap and the author of our newsletter, “The Fight,” about local battles over renewable permitting around the country.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Jael about the bleak outlook for offshore wind, the use of presidential authority to impede energy development, and why solar has been spared — so far. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It seems like there’s a mix here of, you know, some projects are now facing active legal trouble because they still had major permits to secure and the Trump administration is now denying those permits. But some projects, as you were saying, seemed safe, but now they’re not. They’re worried about getting these kind of iterative findings from the government that you need to conduct any major work in federal waters.
How much of the chill that we’re seeing is about active permitting denials, versus how much of it is developers being like, we don’t want to risk getting a permit denied, or asking for something that would be very normal to get a normal approval in the course of normal business operations, getting it rejected and then just being stuck. And so we’d rather just pause, not ask for anything for four years, and then come back and start asking again?
Jael Holzman: Offshore wind industry executives won’t say this on the record, but they have anonymously told me, in many words, that they view what is happening to them in the federal permitting system as not only a barometer check for where the energy transition is, but even broader, it is a risk, it is a challenge, it is a threat to integrity.
With respect to our federal permitting processes, generally what we’re seeing here is, I’ve had some folks in conservative energy circles compare it to the Keystone XL-ification of the energy sector, where the political party that doesn’t like a particular technology weaponizes the permitting system against one particular sector. Now, obviously, it’s politically advantageous for conservatives to describe it this way, but I actually find it to be very useful because what it means is as the politics becomes more fraught for the party in power around a technology, there’s increasingly a willingness to step beyond the realm of what the permitting system is legally supposed to do. And that’s a danger if it’s weaponized against an entire sector.
You know, Keystone pipeline, that was one project. It was exemplary — there was a lot of fervor around that one project — that is not an entire sector having the thumb put on its scale by political officials to derail it, especially one that had been a decade-plus in the works and is required for the energy grids to remain stable in various parts of our country. You know, what we’re seeing here is federal officials not even being willing to schedule meetings for permitting processes that are legally required under the law.
For example, my reporting indicated that at least one project that was prioritized under a permitting reform law to have at least an idea public and put out there for when they would expect to get all their permits — this was the Blue Point Wind offshore wind proposal off the coast of New England and New Jersey, New York. And what we’re seeing here is essentially the obscuring of even what permitting reform ostensibly was supposed to do, right?
There was this conversation in D.C. before Trump took office that maybe if you couple statutory reforms that streamline the processes that currently exist, and you put some sort of timetable into the statute, and you combine that with some gimmes to the oil and gas people, right, at least you could grease the skids enough to have everyone benefit. But my reporting on what’s happened to offshore wind has truly revealed that in many respects, “all of the above” is really a Lucy-with-the-football moment for many proponents of an energy transition.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.