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Now can we talk about the hard stuff?
Today is Methane Day at COP28 in Dubai, and there has been a slew of new commitments to wrangle the highly potent, short-lived greenhouse gas:
➢ The Biden administration finalized the strongest-ever federal regulations in the U.S. covering the methane that leaks from existing oil and gas wells, plus tightened rules for new wells. The Environmental Protection Agency expects to achieve a nearly 80% reduction in emissions compared to a world without the rules.
➢ Canada is also expected to announce new methane regulations.
➢ Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan — home to some of the biggest methane leaks from oil and gas operations in recent years — joined a global pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% this decade. If the pledge is successful, it could eliminate more than 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050.
➢ Nearly 50 oil and gas companies signed onto a “decarbonization charter,” committing to reduce the ratio of methane released to fuels produced to 0.2% by 2030, and to capture the gas instead of flaring it. For reference, the current methane intensity of U.S. oil and gas production is about 2.5%.
➢ A new partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies, the United Nations Environment Program, the Environmental Defense Fund, the International Energy Agency, and RMI will use satellite data and analysis of leaks to hold companies and governments — in particular the oil and gas charter members — to their pledges.
➢ All of this follows a new methane deal from the European Union to reduce methane leaks at home and, by 2030, require companies importing oil and gas to the EU to meet a standard for emissions associated with their product.
➢ China also recently released a methane action plan, and agreed for the first time to include non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases like methane in its emissions targets. The country is a co-host of the Summit on Methane and Other Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gases at COP28 today.
This is not the first time many of these groups have pledged to address methane, which leaks into the atmosphere from oil and gas infrastructure, coal mines, landfills, and farms. But taken together, today’s actions bring more ambition, transparency, and accountability to the task.
During a press briefing on Friday morning, U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry told reporters that reducing methane emissions is the “easiest, quickest, cheapest, simplest” way to fight climate change. There’s two reasons for that. First, since methane begins breaking down in the atmosphere after about a decade (unlike CO2, which can last hundreds of years), cutting methane emissions will reduce warming significantly in the near-term. Second, experts say that reducing leaks from oil and gas infrastructure is both technologically doable and cost-effective. “It’s not complicated technology,” Kerry said. “It’s mostly plumbing.”
But for an issue that’s so easy to address, the scourge on methane has sucked up a lot of oxygen in the climate conversation over the past five years, especially in the U.S. Writing about “the quickest way to slow warming” has become a tired cliché for climate journalists, me included. Ever since scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund reported that methane emissions from oil and gas production were being severely undercounted in 2018, attention to methane by environmental groups, researchers, the U.S. government, and even the oil and gas industry has steadily risen. But so have methane emissions, according to some estimates.
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The Obama administration first tried to regulate emissions from existing wells and tighten standards for new wells in 2016. Then the industry sued. Trump rolled back the rules. The Biden administration tried again in 2021, proposing new rules during COP26 in Glasgow and spearheading the Global Methane Pledge. One year later, during COP27, the Biden administration issued yet another proposal to “update, strengthen, and expand on” the original. Now that the rules are finalized, some won’t even go into effect for another two years so that states have time to develop plans to adhere to the regulations on existing wells.
It does look like this moment is different — that this could be a real turning point. Engineers have made great advances in methane detection technology. Satellites, drones, and handheld detectors have turned up “super-emitters,” astoundingly large leaks from oil and gas operations all over the world that would have otherwise gone unnoticed and unaddressed.
During the Friday morning press briefing, billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, who is putting $40 million toward the new watchdog effort to hold companies accountable, promised this would not be “just another announcement.” He pointed to his Beyond Coal campaign, which successfully shut down 70% of U.S. coal plants over the past five years. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said there will finally be transparency. “Without transparency, all we have is pledges,” she said.
So the world may finally be moving in concert to address methane, this lowest hanging fruit, this bare minimum, this fastest way to slow warming. Well, la-di-da. Now that there’s some consensus on methane, will there be more room to talk about the harder stuff? Like, the root cause of climate change? Like, ending the use of oil and gas, and — god help us — coal?
The U.S. committed today to finally phasing out the dirtiest fossil fuel, but other countries — notably India — are still digging in their heels. Andersen mentioned a report the UNEP released in November, which found that the majority of oil and gas producers plan to increase their production between now and 2030, and some until 2050.
“The addiction to fossil fuels still has its claws deep in many nations,” the report says. “Governments are planning to produce, and the world is planning to consume, over double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with the pathway to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C. These plans throw the global energy transition into question. They throw humanity’s future into question.”
Yes, cutting methane emissions from oil and gas operations will stave off worse climate impacts, buying the world some time as it tackles the much harder challenge of phasing out fossil fuels. But it also gives fossil fuel companies a new defensive weapon as we enter this next stage of climate action. They will be able to say their products are cleaner — perhaps even that we should thank them for helping the world avoid 0.2 degrees C of warming while their plans “throw humanity’s future into question.” To make progress beyond methane, we’ll need to get from pledges to action a lot more quickly.
This story has been updated.
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A new subsidy for metallurgical coal won’t help Trump’s energy dominance agenda, but it would help India and China.
Crammed into the Senate’s reconciliation bill alongside more attention-grabbing measures that could cripple the renewables industry in the U.S. is a new provision to amend the Inflation Reduction Act to support metallurgical coal, allowing producers to claim the advanced manufacturing tax credit through 2029. That extension alone could be worth up to $150 million a year for the “beautiful clean coal” industry (as President Trump likes to call it), according to one lobbyist following the bill.
Putting aside the perversity of using a tax credit from a climate change bill to support coal, the provision is a strange one. The Trump administration has made support for coal one of the centerpieces of its “energy dominance” strategy, ordering coal-fired power plants to stay open and issuing a raft of executive orders to bolster the industry. President Trump at one point even suggested that the elite law firms that have signed settlements with the White House over alleged political favoritism could take on coal clients pro bono.
But metallurgical coal is not used for electricity generation, it’s used for steel-making. Moreover, most of the metallurgical coal the U.S. produces gets exported overseas. In other words, cheaper metallurgical coal would do nothing for American energy dominance, but it would help other countries pump up their production of steel, which would then compete with American producers.
The new provision “has American taxpayers pay to send metallurgical coal to China so they can make more dirty steel and dump it on the global market,” Jane Flegal, the former senior director for industrial emissions in the Biden White House, told me.
The U.S. produced 67 million short tons of metallurgical coal in 2023, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, more than three-quarters of which was shipped abroad. Looking at more recent EIA data, the U.S. exported 57 million tons of metallurgical coal through the first nine months of 2024. The largest recipient was India, the final destination for over 10 million short tons of U.S. metallurgical coal, with almost 9 million going to China. Almost 7 million short tons were exported to Brazil, and over 5 million to the Netherlands.
“Metallurgical coal accounts for approximately 10% of U.S. coal output, and nearly all of it is exported. Thermal coal produced in the United States, by contrast, mostly is consumed domestically,”according to the EIA.
The tax credit comes at a trying time for the metallurgical coal sector. After export prices spiked at $344 per short ton in the second quarter of 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (much of Ukraine’s metallurgical coal production occurs in one of its most hotly contested regions), prices fell to $145 at the end of 2024, according to EIA data.
In their most recent quarterly reports, a number of major metallurgical coal producers told investors they wanted to reduce costs “as the industry awaits a reversal of the currently weak metallurgical coal market,” according to S&P Global Commodities Insights, citing low global demand for steel and economic uncertainty.
There was “not a whisper” of the provision before the Senate’s bill was released, according to the lobbyist, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “No one had any inkling this was coming,” they told me.
But it’s been a pleasant surprise to the metallurgical coal industry and its investors.
Alabama-based Warrior Met Coal, which exports nearly all the coal it produces, reported a loss in the first quarter of 2025,blaming “the combination of broad economic uncertainty around global trade, seasonal demand weakness, and ample spot supply is expected to result in continued pressure on steelmaking coal prices.” Its shares were up almost 6% in afternoon trading Monday.
Tennessee-based Alpha Metallurgical Resources reported a $34 million first quarter loss in May, citing “poor market conditions and economic uncertainty caused by shifting tariff and trade policies,” and said it planned to reduce capital expenditures from its previous forecast. Its shares were up almost 7%.
While environmentalists have kept a hawk’s eye on the hefty donations from the oil and gas industry to Trump and other Republicans’ campaign coffers, it appears that the coal industry is the fossil fuel sector getting specific special treatment, despite being far, far smaller. The largest coal companies are worth a few billion dollars; the largest oil and gas companies are worth a few hundred billion.
But coal is very important to a few states — and very important to Donald Trump.
The bituminous coal that has metallurgical properties tends to be mined in Appalachia, with some of the major producers and exporters based in Tennessee and Alabama, or larger companies with mining operations in West Virginia.
One of those, Alliance Resource Partners, shipped almost 6 million tons of coal overseas. Its chief executive, Joseph Craft, andhis wife, Kelly, the former ambassador to the United Nations, are generous Republican donors. Craft was a guest at the White House during the signing ceremony for the coal executive orders.
Representatives of Warrior, Alpha Metallurgical, and Alliance Resources did not respond to a requests for comment.
While coal companies and their employees tend to be loyal Republican donors, the relative small size of the industry puts its financial clout well south of the oil and gas industry, where a single donor like Continental Resources’s Harold Hamm can give over $4 million and the sector as a whole can donate $75 million. This suggests that Trump and the Senate’s attachment to coal has more to do with coal’s specific regional clout, or even the aesthetics of coal mining and burning compared to solar panels and wind turbines.
After all, anyone can donate money, but in Trump’s Washington, only one resource can be beautiful and clean.
Two former Department of Energy staffers argue from experience that severe foreign entity restrictions aren’t the way to reshore America’s clean energy supply chain.
The latest version of Congress’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” claims to be tough on China. Instead, it penalizes American energy developers and hands China the keys to dominate 21st century energy supply chains and energy-intensive industries like AI.
Republicans are on the verge of enacting a convoluted maze of “foreign entity” restrictions and penalties on U.S. manufacturers and energy companies in the name of excising China from U.S. energy supply chains. We share this goal to end U.S. reliance on Chinese minerals and manufacturing. While at the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House, we worked on numerous efforts to combat China’s grip on energy supply chains. That included developing tough, nuanced and, importantly, workable rules to restrict tax credit eligibility for electric vehicles made using materials from China or Chinese entities — rules that quickly began to shift supply chains away from China and toward the U.S. and our allies.
That experience tells us that the rules in the Republican bill will have the opposite effect. In reality, they will make it much more difficult for U.S. companies to move supply chains away from Chinese control. The GOP’s proposed restrictions require every developer of a critical minerals project, advanced manufacturing facility, or clean energy power plant to sift through their supply chains and contracts for any relationship with a Chinese (or Russian, Iranian, or North Korean) entity. Using a Chinese technology license, or too many subcomponents, or materials produced in China — even if there are few or no alternatives — would be enough to render a company ineligible for the very incentives they need to finance and build new U.S. energy production or manufacturing facilities.
This would put companies in the position of having to prove the absence of Chinese entanglements (and guarantee that there will be none in the future) to qualify for tax credits, an all but impossible task, particularly given the untested set of new rules. Huge portions of the supply chain have flowed through China for decades, including 65% of global lithium processing and 97% of solar wafer manufacturing. American companies are already working to distance themselves from Chinese expertise and components, but the complex, commingled nature of global supply chains and corporate business structures make it infeasible to flip the switch overnight.
On top of that, the latest version of the bill would impose a brand new tax on any new solar and wind projects that have too much foreign entity “assistance,” while providing the Treasury Secretary carte blanche for determining what that might be. The result: An impossible bind, whereby the very sectors that need the most support to disentangle from China are now the ones most penalized by the new Republican “foreign entity” restrictions.
The fact is that China is ahead, not behind, in many energy sectors, and America desperately needs help playing catch-up. Ford’s CEO has called Chinese battery and electric vehicle technologies “an existential threat” to U.S. automaking. In energy supply chains for nuclear, solar, batteries, and critical minerals, China is not merely producing cheap knockoffs of American inventions, it is churning outcutting-edge battery chemistries, advancedmanufacturing processes, and high-speedcharging systems, all at lower cost. And at least until the Inflation Reduction Act enacted incentives for U.S. manufacturing and deployment, the gap between the U.S. and China waswidening.
These untested foreign entity rules will widen that gap once more. Since the start of the year, developers have abandoned more than $14 billion in domestic clean energy deployment and manufacturing projects, citing the uncertain tariff and tax policy environment, and that was before the new tax on solar and wind. New analysis from Energy Innovation finds that the latest version of the bill would reduce U.S. generation capacity by 300 gigawatts over the next decade — multiple times what we will need to power new data centers for artificial intelligence. Stopping clean energy projects in their tracks is also likely to trigger an energy price shock by constraining the very energy technologies that can be built most quickly. In the end we will cede not only our supply chains to China, but also our competitive edge in the race for AI and manufacturing dominance.
Fortunately, we have all the ingredients in this country already to achieve energy leadership. The U.S. boasts deep capital markets, a highly skilled manufacturing and construction workforce, a strong consumer economy driving demand, and, in spite of recent attacks, the world’s greatest universities and national labs. We simply need policy to provide a workable path for companies to invest with certainty, bring factories back to the United States, hire American workers, and learn to produce these technologies at scale.
With the Inflation Reduction Act’s domestic production incentives and supply chain restrictions, hundreds of companies stepped up over the past few years and made that bet, pouring billions of dollars into American supply chains. Should they be enacted, the reconciliation bill’s foreign entity rules would slam the brakes on all that activity, playing right into China’s hands.
There is a way to apply a set of carefully crafted restrictions to wean us off Chinese supply chains, but we cannot afford to saddle American energy with new taxes and red tape. If we scatter rakes across the floor for companies to step on, they will just throw up their hands and send their investments overseas, leaving us more reliant on China than before.
On taxing renewables, climate finance, and Europe’s heat wave
Current conditions: Parts of Northern California are under red flag warnings as warm air meets whipping winds • China’s southwestern Guizhou province is flooded for the second time in a week • A potential bomb cyclone is taking aim at Australia’s east coast.
Late on Friday Senate Republicans added a new tax on solar and wind projects to the budget reconciliation megabill that sent many in the industry into full-blown crisis mode. The proposal would levy a first-of-its-kind penalty on all solar and wind projects tied to the quantity of materials they source from companies with ties to China or other countries designated as adversaries by the U.S. government. “Taken together with other factors both in the bill and not, including permitting timelines and Trump’s tariffs, this tax could indefinitely undermine renewables development in America,” wrote Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. Here are a few reactions from politicians and industry insiders:
The Senate began debating the GOP’s megabill yesterday. Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina was one of two from the majority party who voted on Saturday against debating the bill. Shortly thereafter, he announced he wouldn’t run for re-election next year after President Trump threatened to back his primary challenger. On Sunday evening, Tillis took to the Senate floor to give an impassioned speech denouncing the bill’s Medicaid cuts and defending wind and solar tax credits. The Senate will resume work on the bill today with what’s known as a “vote-a-rama,” during which senators will offer and vote on amendments that could yet introduce significant changes. A final vote from the Senate on the bill is expected sometime today.
The fourth International Conference on Financing for Development kicks off today in Spain, offering world leaders an opportunity to reform the world’s financial aid systems. The conference happens once per decade. This year’s delegates have already adopted the “Sevilla Commitment,” which commits to closing the $4 trillion financing gap for global goals such as ensuring everyone has affordable and reliable energy, making cities sustainable, and mobilizing $100 billion in climate mitigation funding each year toward developing countries. As Reuters explained, the text focuses on helping poor nations pay for adaptation through debt swaps, potential pollution taxes, and other creative funding mechanisms. More than 70 world leaders will be there, as will World Bank President Ajay Banga and representatives from the Gates Foundation. The U.S. government will not have a representative at the talks. The Trump administration withdrew after trying and failing to remove any mention of “climate” and “sustainability” from the conference’s draft text. Some sources told Reuters the event could be more successful without the U.S. there to “water down objectives.”
The European Union is considering changing its climate law to allow countries to lean on international carbon credits to reach emissions targets. The original goal was to cut direct emissions by 90% by 2040 compared to 1990 levels, but some countries have pushed back on that ambition, citing costs. A draft of the proposed change shows that the European Commission would allow high-quality carbon credits to account for 3% of the emissions cut starting in 2036. As Politico explains: “Such credits will allow the EU to pay for emissions-slashing projects in other, usually poorer countries, and count the resulting greenhouse gas reductions toward its own 2040 target, rather than the climate goals of the country hosting the project.” Accounting for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the EU ranks fourth on the list of highest polluters, behind China, the U.S., and India.
Meanwhile, Europe is facing a punishing early-summer heat wave that is already smashing records and triggering weather alerts. A few numbers:
Nearly a third of the citizens of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu have applied for the world’s first climate visa, which would allow them to permanently migrate to Australia.