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Life cycle analysis has some problems.
About six months ago, a climate scientist from Arizona State University, Stephanie Arcusa, emailed me a provocative new paper she had published that warned against our growing reliance on life cycle analysis. This practice of measuring all of the emissions related to a given product or service throughout every phase of its life — from the time raw materials are extracted to eventual disposal — was going to hinder our ability to achieve net-zero emissions, she wrote. It was a busy time, and I let the message drift to the bottom of my inbox. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Life cycle analysis permeates the climate economy. Businesses rely on it to understand their emissions so they can work toward reducing them. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate risk disclosure rule, which requires companies to report their emissions to investors, hinges on it. The clean hydrogen tax credit requires hydrogen producers to do a version of life cycle analysis to prove their eligibility. It is central to carbon markets, and carbon removal companies are now developing standards based on life cycle analysis to “certify” their services as carbon offset developers did before them.
At the same time, many of the fiercest debates in climate change are really debates about life cycle analysis. Should companies be held responsible for the emissions that are indirectly related to their businesses, and if so then which ones? Are carbon offsets a sham? Does using corn ethanol as a gasoline substitute reduce emissions or increase them? Scientists have repeatedly reached opposite conclusions on that one depending on how they accounted for the land required to grow corn and what it might have been used for had ethanol not been an option. Though the debate plays out in calculations, it’s really a philosophical brawl.
Everybody, for the most part, knows that life cycle analysis is difficult and thorny and imprecise. But over and over, experts and critics alike assert that it can be improved. Arcusa disagrees. Life cycle analysis, she says, is fundamentally broken. “It’s a problematic and uncomfortable conclusion to arrive at,” Arcusa wrote in her email. “On the one hand, it has been the only tool we have had to make any progress on climate. On the other, carbon accounting is captured by academia and vested interests and will jeopardize global climate goals.”
When I recently revisited the paper, I learned that Arcusa and her co-authors didn’t just critique life cycle analysis, they proposed a bold alternative. Their idea is not economically or politically easy, but it also doesn’t suffer from the problems of trying to track carbon throughout the supply chain. I recently called her up to talk through it. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
Can you walk me through what the biggest issues with life cycle analysis are?
So, life cycle analysis is a qualitative tool —
It seems kind of counterintuitive or even controversial to call it a qualitative tool because it’s specifically trying to quantify something.
I think the best analogy for LCA is that it’s a back-of-the-envelope tool. If you really could measure everything, then sure, LCA is this wonderful idea. The problem is in the practicality of being able to collect all of that data. We can’t, and that leads us to use emissions factors and average numbers, and we model this and we model that, and we get so far away from reality that we actually can’t tell if something is positive or negative in the end.
The other problem is that it’s almost entirely subjective, which makes one LCA incomparable to another LCA depending on the context, depending on the technology. And yes, there are some standardization efforts that have been going on for decades. But if you have a ruler, no matter how much you try, it’s not going to become a screwdriver. We’re trying to use this tool to quantify things and make them the same for comparison, and we can’t because of that subjectivity.
In this space where there is a lot of money to be made, it’s very easy to manipulate things one way or another to make it look a little bit better because the method is not robust. That’s really the gist of the problems here.
One of the things you talk about in the paper is the way life cycle analysis is subject to different worldviews. Can you explain that?
It’s mostly seen in what to include or exclude in the LCA — it can have enormous impacts on the results. I think corn ethanol is the perfect example of how tedious this can be because we still don’t have an answer, precisely for that reason. The uncertainty range of the results has shrunk and gotten bigger and shrunk and gotten bigger, and it’s like, well, we still don’t know. And now, this exact same worldview debate is playing into what should be included and not included in certification for things [like carbon removal] that are going to be sold under the guise of climate action, and that just can’t be. We’ll be forever debating whether something is true.
Is this one of those things that scientists have been debating for ever, or is this argument that we should stop using life cycle analysis more of a fringe idea?
I guess I would call it a fringe idea today. There’s been plenty of criticism throughout the years, even from the very beginning when it was first created. What I have seen is that there is criticism, and then there is, “But here’s how we can solve it and continue using LCA!” I’ve only come across one other publication that specifically said, “This is not working. This is not the right tool,” and that’s from Michael Gillenwater. He’s at the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. He was like, “What are we doing?” There might be other folks, I just haven’t come across them.
Okay, so what is the alternative to LCA that you’ve proposed in this paper?
LCA targets the middle of the supply chain, and tries to attribute responsibility there. But if you think about where on the supply chain the carbon is the most well-known, it is actually at the source, at the point of origin, before it becomes an emission. At the point where it is created out of the ground is where we know how much carbon there is. If we focus on that source through a policy that requires mandatory sequestration — for every ton of carbon that is now produced, there is a ton of carbon that’s been put away through carbon removal, and the accounting happens there, before it is sold to anybody — anybody who’s now downstream of that supply chain is already carbon neutral. There is no need to track carbon all the way down to the consumer.
We know this is accurate because that is where governments already collect royalties and taxes — they want to know exactly how much is being sold. So we already do this. The big difference is that the policy would be required there instead of taxing everybody downstream.
You’re saying that fossil fuel producers should be required to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere for every ton of carbon in the fuels they sell?
Yeah, and maybe I should be more specific. They should pay for an equal amount of carbon to be removed from the atmosphere. In no way are we implying that a fossil carbon producer needs to also be doing the sequestration themselves.
What would be the biggest challenges of implementing something like this?
The ultimate challenge is convincing people that we need to be managing carbon and that this is a waste management type of system. Nobody really wants to pay for waste management, and so it needs to be regulated and demanded by some authority.
What about the fact that we don’t really have the ability to remove carbon or store carbon at scale today, and may not for some time?
Yes, we need to build capacity so that eventually we can match the carbon production to the carbon removal, which is why we also proposed that the liability needs to start today, not in the future. That liability is as good as a credit card debt — you actually have to pay it. It can be paid little by little every year, but the liability is here now, and not in the future.
The risk in the system that I’m describing, or even the system that is currently being deployed, is that you have counterproductive technologies that are being developed. And by counterproductive, I mean [carbon removal] technologies that are producing more emissions than they are storing, and so they’re net-positive. You can create a technology that has no intention of removing more carbon than its sequesters. The intention is just to earn money.
Do you mean, like, the things that are supposed to be removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it, they are using fossil fuels to do that, and end up releasing more carbon in the process?
Yeah, so basically, what we show in the paper is that when we get to full carbon neutrality, the market forces alone will eliminate those kinds of technologies that are counterproductive. The problem is during the transition, these technologies can be economically viable because they are cheaper than they would be if 100% of the fossil fuel they used was carbon neutral through carbon removal. And so in order to prevent those technologies from gaming the system, we need a way to artificially make the price of fossil carbon as expensive as it would be if 100% of that fossil carbon was covered by carbon removal.
That’s where the idea of permits comes in. For every amount that I produce, I now have an instant liability, which is a permit. Each of those permits has to be matched by carbon removal. And since we don’t have enough carbon removal, we have futures and these futures represent the promise of actually doing carbon removal.
What if we burn through the remaining carbon budget and we still don’t have the capacity to sequester enough carbon?
Well, then we’re going into very unchartered territory. Right now we’re just mindlessly going through this thinking that if we just reduce emissions it will be good. It won’t be good.
In the paper, you also argue against mitigating greenhouse gases other than carbon, and that seems pretty controversial to me. Why is that?
We’re not arguing against mitigating, per se. We’re arguing against lumping everything under the same carbon accounting framework because lumping hides the difficulty in actually doing something about it. It’s not that we shouldn’t mitigate other greenhouse gases — we must. It’s just that if we separate the problem of carbon away from the problem of methane, away from the problem of nitrous oxide, or CFCs, we can tackle them more effectively. Because right now, we’re trying to do everything under the same umbrella, and that doesn’t work. We don’t tackle drinking and driving by sponsoring better tires. That’s just silly, right? We wouldn’t do that. We would tackle drinking and driving on its own, and then we would tackle better tires in a different policy.
So the argument is: Most of climate change is caused by carbon; let’s tackle that separately from the others and leave tackling methane and nitrous oxide to purposefully created programs to tackle those things. Let’s not lump the calculations altogether, hiding all the differences and hiding meaningful action.
Is there still a role for life cycle analysis?
You don’t want to be regulating carbon using life cycle analysis. So you can use the life cycle analysis for qualitative purposes, but we’re pretending that it is a tool that can deliver accurate results, and it just doesn’t.
What has the response been like to this paper? What kind of feedback have you gotten?
Stunned silence!
Nobody has said anything?
In private, they have. Not in public. In private, it’s been a little bit like, “I’ve always thought this, but it seemed like there was no other way.” But then in public, think about it. Everything is built on LCA. It’s now in every single climate bill out there. Every single standard. Every single consulting company is doing LCA and doing carbon footprinting for companies. It’s a huge industry, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear nothing publicly.
Yeah, I was gonna ask — I’ve been writing about the SEC rules and this idea that companies should start reporting their emissions to their investors, and that would all be based on LCA. There’s a lot of buy-in for that idea across the climate movement.
Yeah, but there’s definitely a fine line with make-believe. I think in many instances, we kid ourselves thinking that we’re going to have numbers that we can hang our hats on. In many instances we will not, and they will be challenged. And so at that point, what’s the point?
One thing I hear when I talk to people about this is, well, having an estimate is better than not having anything, or, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or, we can just keep working to make them better and better. Why not?
I mean, I wouldn’t say don’t try. But when it comes to actually enforcing anything, it’s going to be extremely hard to prove a number. You could just be stuck in litigation for a long time and still not have an answer.
I don’t know, to me it just seems like an endless debate while time is ticking and we will just feel good because we’ll have thought we measured everything. But we’re still not doing anything.
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Riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area are staring down budget crises, with deep service cuts not far behind.
Three of the country’s largest public transportation systems are facing severe budget shortfalls that have left them near a breaking point. Transit riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area of California could see severe service cuts as soon as next year if their representatives don’t secure funding to fill significant gaps in their operations budgets, the result of dwindling ridership and federal aid.
Should these lawmakers fail or fall short, they could kick off what transit advocates refer to as a “death spiral,” where higher fares and worse service leads to lower ridership, which leads to more cuts, etc., until there’s effectively no service left.
“I think that in a lot of cases, the public, legislators, governors are maybe not aware of just how high the stakes are right now,” David Weiskopf, the senior policy director for Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that helps to elect climate-minded politicians, told me.
Public transit is a uniquely tricky, political issue, as it requires convincing elected officials from across a given state to address an issue that primarily affects people in one concentrated region — even if that region happens to be one of the main economic engines of the entire state economy. And yet transportation is the No. 1 way Americans contribute to climate change. While electric vehicles get a lot more attention as a climate solution, expanding public transit can also reduce emissions with the added benefits of minimizing the raw materials extraction and electricity demand that come along with EVs.
But that’s just a part of what Weiskopf is talking about in terms of the stakes. Millions of people rely on public transit to get themselves to work and their kids to school. Public transit also reduces local air pollution and traffic. Losing the services that already exist would surrender all of those benefits — worsening affordability and quality of life just as they have become top-tier political issues.
There’s a clear chain of events that led so many major transit systems to the brink of collapse this year. In the late 1990s, Congress eliminated federal funding for public transit operations in major cities, instead allocating all of its financial assistance to capital transit projects, such as new or improved infrastructure. Buses and metros began to rely more heavily on revenue from fares to cover operating expenses like staff and fuel. That became disastrous when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and cut ridership dramatically.
Congress passed a series of pandemic relief laws that provided substantial funding for transit operations, keeping them afloat to shuttle essential workers. But that money dried up, and in many places, ridership has remained stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels for reasons including the rise in remote work. Meanwhile, transit systems continued to age, and the cost of labor and materials rose.
State lawmakers have been slow to act, allowing their biggest cities’ transit systems to inch dangerously close to the edge of a fiscal cliff. In Illinois, the legislature has just a few days left in its session to find the money to prevent layoffs and service cuts across Chicago’s three transit systems next year. In California, the state is hammering out a stopgap loan to keep Bay Area operators funded through 2026, while betting the longer-term health of the system on a ballot measure next fall. The split Pennsylvania legislature is at a total impasse on the issue. Governor Josh Shapiro recently authorized transit agencies to dip into their capital budgets to prevent immediate service cuts, but there’s no longer-term solution in sight.
These three states are not entirely unique — almost every public transit system in the country is dealing with the same challenges. But they’re useful case studies to illustrate just how high the stakes are, and what kinds of solutions are on the table.
Prior to the pandemic, two of San Francisco’s regional rail systems — Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, and Cal Train — were covering upwards of 70% of their operating costs with fares, Sebastian Petty, the senior transportation policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, told me. In 2024, however, fare revenue was roughly half of what it was in 2019, covering just under a third of the cost of running the system, with the rest filled in by emergency federal assistance. “There’s no real, obvious path to financial sustainability that doesn't involve some longer source of sustained new public funding,” Petty said.
BART now projects that its COVID relief funding will be gone by spring of next year, after which it will face a deficit of $350 million to $400 million per year. The implications are catastrophic. The fixed costs of operating the system are so high that service cuts alone can’t make up the shortfall. BART estimates that even if it cut service by 90% — including closing at 9 p.m., cutting frequency from every 20 minutes to once an hour, shutting down two full train lines, laying off more than 1,000 workers — that would not be enough to close the gap.
The legislature decided on a regional sales tax as the best way to fund the system, but has left the final say in the matter up to voters. In September, lawmakers passed a bill that authorized a ballot measure in five Bay Area counties next year. Voters will be asked to approve a sales tax increase of half a cent — or a full cent, in the case of San Francisco — for a period of 14 years.
Regardless of whether the ballot measure is successful, however, the transit system still faces a fiscal cliff next year without some kind of bridge funding. A separate bill requires the state Department of Finance to propose a solution for short-term financial assistance for Bay Area transit agencies to bridge the roughly $750 million budget gap for the next year to prevent immediate service cuts. The department has a deadline of January 10, after which the legislature will have to vote on the proposal.
“To be frank, this is not a great position to be in,” Petty said. “People are really, really worried.” But he said this still seems like the best path forward given how large the scale of money needed is. “I say this as someone who’s worked in transit for a while,” Petty told me. “Transit seems to be in some degree of perpetual funding challenge, but this one really is different.”
Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority, which governs the area’s three transit companies, says that it faces a $230 million budget shortfall next year, which could increase nearly fourfold in 2027 without new funding. The agency has warned that it will begin cutting paratransit service for people with disabilities as soon as April, which will expand to main line service and layoffs over the summer if the legislature can’t agree on a new revenue source this month.
Amy Rynell, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit, told me the uncertainty alone has hurt the transit operators’ ability to plan. “The agencies are having to spend a lot of time putting forth multiple budgets to figure out what to do in this moment,” she said. “That’s detracting from the ability to build for the future and develop new projects. People are having to look at keeping the doors open versus making transit better.”
Lawmakers in Illinois spent much of the first half of the year trying to nail down a deal, but they prioritized working on reforms to the regional transit system before figuring out how to fund it. On May 31, during the final hours of the regular legislative session, the state Senate passed a bill that would create several revenue raisers for public transit, such as a statewide $1.50 “Climate Impact Fee” on retail deliveries, a statewide electric vehicle charging fee, a real estate transfer tax, and a tax on rideshare services like Uber and Lyft. But lawmakers in the House claimed they didn’t have enough time to review the implications of such measures. An earlier idea to increase tolls died in the face of opposition from lawmakers representing the suburbs as well as labor groups.
The legislature has just three days left — October 28 through 30 — in a special veto session to reach an agreement on transit funding. Rynell was optimistic that it would get there. “It remains a priority of the House, Senate, and governor’s team,” she said. “People have put a lot of time and effort into getting a good package because the legislative leaders don’t want to be back in the same place in five or 10 years.”
For two years in a row, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, has narrowly avoided a fiscal crisis with stopgap solutions from the governor’s office after the legislature failed to secure any transit funding. In November 2024, Governor Shapiro got approval from the Biden administration to transfer $153 million in federal capital highway funds to SEPTA, preventing immediate service cuts and postponing a 21% fare hike. But the agency still anticipated a $213 million gap, and said it would have to implement both the rate hike and service cuts this fall unless it secured additional funding.
The funding never came. The Pennsylvania legislature, paralyzed by a one-seat Democratic majority in the House and a Republican Senate, let a June 30 state budget deadline come and go. “Five of these funding bills, sort of different permutations, passed the State House that would have given sustainable revenue for transit,” Stephen Bronskill, the coalition manager at Transit Forward Philadelphia, told me. “All these bills were bipartisan. They failed in the State Senate.”
Weeks of uncertainty and chaos followed. In late August, SEPTA followed through with raising fares and began cutting service. Just two weeks later, however, a court sided with consumer rights advocates who argued that the cuts disproportionately impacted people of color and low-income riders, and ordered SEPTA to restore service.
During those two weeks, residents got a taste of what the future could hold: workers late to work, students late to class, overcrowded buses and trolleys, confusion about which routes were still operating. After the court order, SEPTA turned to a desperate measure — a request to use up to $394 million of state funds designated for capital expenditures on its operations, instead. The move would preserve full service for two years, but at the expense of infrastructure repairs and upgrades. Governor Shapiro approved the request.
“It’s a Band-Aid solution, and no new money for transit has been allocated,” Bronskill said. It’s also a particularly terrible time to deplete SEPTA’s capital budget, as its aging railcars are becoming dangerous to operate. There have been five fires on SEPTA railcars in 2025 alone. A recent report from the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Authority’s 1970s-era “silverliner” cars, which make up about 60% of the fleet, predate federal fire safety hazards and require either extensive retrofits or replacement.
The money will also only benefit transit systems in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Bronskill noted. “Every other transit agency across the state faces the same cliff of having to cut service in the face of the deficits. So we are continuing this fight.”
Pennsylvania lawmakers have proposed some of the same ideas that have been floated in Illinois to raise money for transit. They’ve also considered a car rental and lease tax, diverting funding from the state sales tax, taxing so-called “skill games” common at bars and convenience stores, and legalizing recreational marijuana.
To Justin Balik, the state program director for the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, the challenge is not so much about coming up with revenue options as mustering “political will and urgency and prioritization.”
But more than anything, Pennsylvania suffers partisan politics and total paralysis due to its split legislature, which is now more than 100 days past the deadline to set even a basic state budget for next year. “I think once that is done, we all have our work cut out for us to tell the story in a compelling way of why the problem isn't solved and why we need faster action on this,” Balik said.
Evergreen is part of a new coalition of environmental and transit advocacy groups and think tanks called the Clean RIDES Network, which stands for Responsible Investments to Decrease Emissions in States, that’s trying to engender the political will for and prioritization of clean transportation solutions in statehouses around the country. The group is advocating for “a more holistic plan for transportation advocacy” that brings together ideas like avoiding highway expansions, improving transit access and efficiencies, and investing in vehicle electrification. Over 100 organizations are involved, including national groups like RMI, Sierra Club, and the NRDC, as well as state advocacy outfits like the Clean Air Council in Pennsylvania and Active Transportation Alliance in Illinois.
Advocates like Balik and Weiskopf, of Climate Cabinet, argued that it’s the right time to put transportation at the front and center of the climate fight. While there’s little state leaders can do to counter President Trump’s actions to weaken U.S. climate policy, public transit is one of the few areas they control. “This is a place that all of these lawmakers have the opportunity to do something meaningful and effective,” Weiskopf said, “even if it is just to prevent another thing from becoming much worse.”
On Detroit layoffs, critical mineral woes, and China hawks vs. cheap energy
Current conditions: Two tropical waves are moving westward across the Atlantic, with atmospheric conditions primed to develop into a storm in the Caribbean • Douala, Cameroon’s largest city and economic capital, notched its highest October temperature since records began in the 1800s, at nearly 95 degrees Fahrenheit • In Spain, average temperatures have eclipsed 86 degrees every day of this month so far.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Alex Wong/Getty Images
On Friday afternoon, Politico published an explosive story suggesting that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright had strained his relationship with President Donald Trump by taking too deliberative an approach and consulting industry before slashing clean energy programs. The report, based on conversations with 10 anonymous sources, teased the possibility that Wright could end up departing the agency. “It just seems so messy right now,” one of the sources said in reference to the relationship. “I don’t know how much longer he’s got.” The frustration, the story indicated, was mutual. The former chief executive of the fracking giant Liberty Energy, Wright reportedly “has been dissatisfied for some time with taking direction from the White House and the strictures of government after years of running his own company,” a dynamic that mirrors issues former Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Rex Tillerson faced as Secretary of State in Trump’s first administration.
When I reached out to an insider with knowledge of the agency, the source told me the story was months behind and no longer reflected the current relationship between Wright and the White House. Other Republicans certainly don’t see Wright’s approach to cutting clean energy programs as too cautious. In an interview with another Politico reporter, Josh Siegel, Utah Senator John Curtis said Wright “does have concerns about too many renewables going onto the market. I don’t. With time my approach has proven right and it will again, in that the government needs to play a productive role in providing affordable, reliable, clean energy.” Meanwhile, more than a third of Americans say their electricity bills are a “major” source of stress, according to a new Associated Press poll.
The Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation last week rescinded a policy requiring the nation’s biggest banks and lenders to factor risks from climate change into longterm planning, The New York Times reported Friday. The Federal Reserve Board staff had called the Biden-era policy “distracting” and “not necessary,” and regulators now said the existing rules that banks “consider and appropriately address all material financial risks” were enough. Critics said the rule change was a cynical ploy to boost fossil fuel production and blamed the FDIC board, whose appointees include White House budget director Russell Vought, for putting the U.S. economy at risk of higher costs as warming worsens.
Auto parts manufacturer Dana Incorporated laid off more than 100 employees from its electric vehicle battery factory in Auburn Hills, Michigan, last week, as the Trump administration’s funding cuts begin to take effect in the broader economy. The pink slips came abruptly. “It’s hard. It’s hard. I’m a single mom of four. So this unexpected layoff is even harder,” one worker, Kassandra Pojok, told the local broadcaster Fox 2. “There are a lot of single parents, a lot of people who are wondering, ‘How are we going to pay our rent?’ We have one check, not even a full check left. We were told not to work our last day.”
The job cuts come in the wake of the Heatmap’s Jeva Lange called “a multi-front blitz on EVs.” The president’s landmark tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, terminated the country’s main federal tax credit for electric vehicles last month. The dramatically shortened deadline led to a surge in EV purchases in the last three months before the tax credit disappeared. “This decision is the result of the unexpected and immediate reduction in customer orders driven by lower demand for electric vehicles, which has rendered continued operations at the plant no longer viable,” Dana Incorporated said in a statement. The factory closure marked “the third time in two months that clean energy manufacturing jobs in Michigan have been put on hold or canceled,” according to the advocacy group Climate Power.
As regular readers of this newsletter know, China is ratcheting up export restrictions on critical minerals such as rare earths. On Friday, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that minerals are “America’s most dangerous dependence.” In a blog post on the influential think tank’s website, Michael Froman warned that China could restrict global access to critical mineral products, including rare earth magnets, and bring much economic activity to a screeching halt.” As the most recent export controls show, “China is willing and able to exploit this strategic vulnerability,” he wrote. “It has already proven its willingness to use export controls as a tool of economic coercion.”
To accelerate domestic production in the U.S., the Trump administration has taken ownership stakes in mining projects, speeded up permitting, and started stockpiling minerals for the military. By gutting the electric vehicle tax credit, however, the administration eliminated one of the most significant sources of demand for mineral production, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote earlier this year, calling it the “paradox” of Trump’s mining policy. As I reported on Friday for Heatmap, overseas mining projects in developing countries don’t always work out; just look at what chaos the coup of Madagascar has created for Denver-based Energy Fuels’ mine in the African nation. But the U.S. can’t go it alone on metals. “While it might be important for the United States to develop some production capacity here at home, it doesn’t have to play catch up entirely on its own,” Froman wrote. “It should work with allies and partners to bring mining and production facilities online more quickly.”
The West can’t lower its energy costs without working with Chinese companies, according to an executive from one of China’s biggest wind turbine manufacturers. While Kai Wu, the vice president of Goldwind, said it was “fully understandable” that foreign governments want to strengthen local supply chains, China’s cost advantage in turbine manufacturing had grown “huge,” at about “40%, at least” compared to Western rivals, he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I always ask them: are you ready to sacrifice the cost of energy? Everybody wants to have the best salary and the lowest workload, but it’s not reality.”
The provocative statements came as fellow Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced plans for a factory in Scotland as part of a push into Europe. It’s coming as China’s own market matures. As I reported in this newsletter in July, Chinese solar installations plunged 85% when the country removed incentives for more panel deployments. With the rate of deployment decreasing, Chinese manufacturers are looking overseas for new markets, as Matthew reported last week. In spite of these trends, China’s power production from coal and gas dropped 5% in September, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air’s Lauri Myllivirta, contributing to a 1.2% drop for the first nine months of the year.
Sixty years after the Thames was declared biologically dead due to years of pollution, the Zoological Society of London has found that the river is revived. Hundreds of wildlife species have returned to London’s central waterway, including seahorses, eels, seals, and shark species with charmingly English names like tope, starry smooth hound, and spurdog sharks.
The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.