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“You just got to follow the money”
The Lesser Prairie-Chicken is a bird made to dance.
I mean, look at it.
Lesser Prairie-Chicken: Plains Performerwww.youtube.com
When spring rolls around, the male’s head plumes and bright orange eyebrows stand at attention. The air sacs on its neck inflate and deflate. It stomps its feet up to 17 times per second, leaps into the air with a cackle, runs a few yards to a different spot, and stomps again, all while trying to fend off other males doing the same thing in an attempt to woo as many females as possible.
The Lesser Prairie-Chicken has been doing this dance for millennia. And congressional Republicans (plus Joe Manchin) are trying to kill it.
More precisely, House Republicans voted on Thursday to take the Lesser Prairie-Chicken and another animal, the Northern Long-Eared Bat, off the list of creatures protected under the Endangered Species Act. They’re following in the footsteps of the Senate, which voted 50-49 in May (guess which Democratic senator from West Virginia voted with the Republicans) that used the Congressional Review Act to overturn a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list both animals as endangered last year.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, it’s the first time in the history of the 30-year-old Congressional Review Act that the law’s been used to target individual species. The White House has already announced that President Biden intends to veto the bill as soon as it reaches his desk, but it likely won’t be the last time Republicans try such a move.
As for why Congress is going after these animals? “You just got to follow the money,” said Jon Hayes, executive director of Audubon Southwest (disclaimer: I used to work at Audubon magazine, which is editorially independent from the Audubon Society). “This is very much a political act not driven by science but by the interest of the oil and gas industry and agricultural interests.”
Both animals have the unenviable position of living in places humans want to exploit. The Northern Long-Eared Bat, which lives in 37 states and has seen populations drop by 97% because of a disease called white-nose syndrome, roosts in trees that loggers would like to cut down. The Lesser Prairie-Chicken lives in the southern Great Plains region, in an area that spans across Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas. They roam through ranches, along grazing areas, and past places that might make good farms, but the population that’s at the greatest risk lives right on the edge of the Permian Basin — also known as the most productive oil field in the world.
The Endangered Species Act, or ESA, is one of the federal government’s most powerful land-management tools. Its purview extends across public and private land alike; if a listed species lives on your land, you are obligated to take steps to protect it. Ranchers and grazers, Hayes told me, can coexist pretty easily alongside the chickens even if they’re protected under the ESA. Oil and gas, by its very nature, cannot.
Historically, oil and gas plants have been winning against the birds. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) first listed the bird as threatened in 2014, but that decision was vacated by a lawsuit in 2015, clearing the way for more ranches and oil fields alike. Conservationists hoped that a raft of voluntary measures could save the bird, but prairie-chicken habitats continued to get squeezed out and their population dropped to somewhere around 30,000, down from a pre-colonial high in the millions. That’s what prompted FWS to list the bird again last year.
“I see it as kind of the pinnacle of human hubris that the quarterly earnings of a corporation should be of more concern to us than a species that's literally been on this earth for over 2 million years, that we could cause to go extinct within less than a century,” Hayes told me.
Congressional Republicans argue that the voluntary measures are good enough, and that listing the bird is an “unnecessary and burdensome regulation that threatens the livelihoods of people in rural America.” According to the Associated Press, Representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas called the ESA “an important but outdated part of U.S. history.”
“The question is always like, what role do they serve?” Hayes said. “And I always push back against that. The role of the chicken is to make more chickens. That's all we should expect it to do.”
The chicken is also an indicator of the health of the Great Plains writ large. Losing the bird may not destroy the entire ecosystem, but it would be a sign that the ecosystem could be past the point of recovery, Hayes said. The area where the chicken lives was once the site of the Dust Bowl, and it sits on top of the vast Ogallala aquifer — which is already being quickly depleted. Protecting the chicken also protects that habitat, from the grasses that sequester carbon to the drinking water that millions of people depend on.
“I’m not going to say that if you take the lesser prairie-chicken off that landscape, everything collapses,” Hayes said. “But we're losing species one by one. And at some point, we have to wake up and say, okay, that's enough. We have got to save this system.
Ironically, protecting the chicken could also block clean energy development — the birds tend to avoid tall structures that could play host to predators, and to a prairie-chicken a wind turbine mast looks suspiciously similar to a tree trunk. And even though Biden’s veto should protect its habitat, the prairie-chicken is going to feel the impacts of oil and gas through climate change. Its population tends to go through booms and busts, and both drought and extreme rain could hit prairie-chicken habitats with such intensity that the population might not be able to recover.
“Honestly, probably the most realistic scenario is we maintain the status quo, and maybe that’s not enough and we lose the bird in a few decades anyway. But even if we resign ourselves to losing this bird, there are more birds that are waiting in the wings to be the next chicken,” Hayes told me. “It's time to get serious about thinking about these ecosystems as natural infrastructure, and investing in them the same way we do with our roads and bridges and highways. Whether it's our Great Plains, our forests, our coasts, or are rivers, they have a value that we need to recognize. They aren’t going to keep maintaining us forever.”
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Republicans are taking over some of the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth.
When Republicans flipped the Senate, they took the keys to three critical energy and climate-focused committees.
These are among the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth. The Senate plays the role of gatekeeper for important legislation, as it requires a supermajority to overcome the filibuster. Hence, it’s both where many promising climate bills from the House go to die, as well as where key administrators such as the heads of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are vetted and confirmed.
We’ll have to wait a bit for the Senate’s new committee chairs to be officially confirmed. But Jeff Navin, co-founder at the climate change-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me that since selections are usually based on seniority, in many cases it’s already clear which Republicans are poised to lead under Trump and which Democrats will assume second-in-command (known as the ranking member). Here’s what we know so far.
1. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
This committee has been famously led by Joe Manchin, the former Democrat, now Independent senator from West Virginia, who will retire at the end of this legislative session. Energy and Natural Resources has a history of bipartisan collaboration and was integral in developing many of the key provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act —- and could thus play a key role in dismantling them. Overall, the committee oversees the DOE, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, so it’s no small deal that its next chairman will likely be Mike Lee, the ultra-conservative Republican from Utah. That’s assuming that the committee's current ranking member, John Barrasso of Wyoming, wins his bid for Republican Senate whip, which seems very likely.
Lee opposes federal ownership of public lands, setting himself up to butt heads with Martin Heinrich, the Democrat from New Mexico and likely the committee’s next ranking member. Lee has also said that solving climate change is simply a matter of having more babies, as “problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, they’re solved by more humans.” As Navin told me, “We've had this kind of safe space where so-called quiet climate policy could get done in the margins. And it’s not clear that that's going to continue to exist with the new leadership.”
2. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
This committee is currently chaired by Democrat Tom Carper of Delaware, who is retiring after this term. Poised to take over is the Republican’s current ranking member, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. She’s been a strong advocate for continued reliance on coal and natural gas power plants, while also carving out areas of bipartisan consensus on issues such as nuclear energy, carbon capture, and infrastructure projects during her tenure on the committee. The job of the Environment and Public Works committee is in the name: It oversees the EPA, writes key pieces of environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and supervises public infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, and dams.
Navin told me that many believe the new Democratic ranking member will be Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, although to do so, he would have to step down from his perch at the Senate Budget Committee, where he is currently chair. A tireless advocate of the climate cause, Whitehouse has worked on the Environment and Public Works committee for over 15 years, and lately seems to have had a relatively productive working relationship with Capito.
3. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
This subcommittee falls under the broader Senate Appropriations Committee and is responsible for allocating funding for the DOE, various water development projects, and various other agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
California’s Dianne Feinstein used to chair this subcommittee until her death last year, when Democrat Patty Murray of Washington took over. Navin told me that the subcommittee’s next leader will depend on how the game of “musical chairs” in the larger Appropriations Committee shakes out. Depending on their subcommittee preferences, the chair could end up being John Kennedy of Louisiana, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. It’s likewise hard to say who the top Democrat will be.
Inside a wild race sparked by a solar farm in Knox County, Ohio.
The most important climate election you’ve never heard of? Your local county commissioner.
County commissioners are usually the most powerful governing individuals in a county government. As officials closer to community-level planning than, say a sitting senator, commissioners wind up on the frontlines of grassroots opposition to renewables. And increasingly, property owners that may be personally impacted by solar or wind farms in their backyards are gunning for county commissioner positions on explicitly anti-development platforms.
Take the case of newly-elected Ohio county commissioner – and Christian social media lifestyle influencer – Drenda Keesee.
In March, Keesee beat fellow Republican Thom Collier in a primary to become a GOP nominee for a commissioner seat in Knox County, Ohio. Knox, a ruby red area with very few Democratic voters, is one of the hottest battlegrounds in the war over solar energy on prime farmland and one of the riskiest counties in the country for developers, according to Heatmap Pro’s database. But Collier had expressed openness to allowing new solar to be built on a case-by-case basis, while Keesee ran on a platform focused almost exclusively on blocking solar development. Collier ultimately placed third in the primary, behind Keesee and another anti-solar candidate placing second.
Fighting solar is a personal issue for Keesee (pronounced keh-see, like “messy”). She has aggressively fought Frasier Solar – a 120 megawatt solar project in the country proposed by Open Road Renewables – getting involved in organizing against the project and regularly attending state regulator hearings. Filings she submitted to the Ohio Power Siting Board state she owns a property at least somewhat adjacent to the proposed solar farm. Based on the sheer volume of those filings this is clearly her passion project – alongside preaching and comparing gay people to Hitler.
Yesterday I spoke to Collier who told me the Frasier Solar project motivated Keesee’s candidacy. He remembered first encountering her at a community meeting – “she verbally accosted me” – and that she “decided she’d run against me because [the solar farm] was going to be next to her house.” In his view, he lost the race because excitement and money combined to produce high anti-solar turnout in a kind of local government primary that ordinarily has low campaign spending and is quite quiet. Some of that funding and activity has been well documented.
“She did it right: tons of ground troops, people from her church, people she’s close with went door-to-door, and they put out lots of propaganda. She got them stirred up that we were going to take all the farmland and turn it into solar,” he said.
Collier’s takeaway from the race was that local commissioner races are particularly vulnerable to the sorts of disinformation, campaign spending and political attacks we’re used to seeing more often in races for higher offices at the state and federal level.
“Unfortunately it has become this,” he bemoaned, “fueled by people who have little to no knowledge of what we do or how we do it. If you stir up enough stuff and you cry out loud enough and put up enough misinformation, people will start to believe it.”
Races like these are happening elsewhere in Ohio and in other states like Georgia, where opposition to a battery plant mobilized Republican primaries. As the climate world digests the federal election results and tries to work backwards from there, perhaps at least some attention will refocus on local campaigns like these.
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Madison County, Missouri – A giant battery material recycling plant owned by Critical Mineral Recovery exploded and became engulfed in flames last week, creating a potential Vineyard Wind-level PR headache for energy storage.
2. Benton County, Washington State – Governor Jay Inslee finally got state approvals finished for Scout Clean Energy’s massive Horse Heaven wind farm after a prolonged battle over project siting, cultural heritage management, and bird habitat.
3. Fulton County, Georgia – A large NextEra battery storage facility outside of Atlanta is facing a lawsuit that commingles usual conflicts over building these properties with environmental justice concerns, I’ve learned.
Here’s what else I’m watching…
In Colorado, Weld County commissioners approved part of one of the largest solar projects in the nation proposed by Balanced Rock Power.
In New Mexico, a large solar farm in Sandoval County proposed by a subsidiary of U.S. PCR Investments on land typically used for cattle is facing consternation.
In Pennsylvania, Schuylkill County commissioners are thinking about new solar zoning restrictions.
In Kentucky, Lost City Renewables is still wrestling with local concerns surrounding a 1,300-acre solar farm in rural Muhlenberg County.
In Minnesota, Ranger Power’s Gopher State solar project is starting to go through the public hearing process.
In Texas, Trina Solar – a company media reports have linked to China – announced it sold a large battery plant the day after the election. It was acquired by Norwegian company FREYR.