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On the emergency in California, clean energy tax credits, and Exxon Mobil
Current conditions: It is 27 degrees Fahrenheit in Dallas, Texas, and snow is expected • The whole of England is under a cold weather health warning until Sunday • A water boil advisory is in effect for Richmond, Virginia, after a winter storm cut power to the city’s water treatment plant.
At least three wildfires are raging in Los Angeles, fanned by strong Santa Ana winds, warm weather, and exceptionally dry conditions. The largest blaze, the Palisades fire, has consumed some 3,000 acres in the Pacific Palisades area since it ignited yesterday and remains uncontained. More than 30,000 people have been told to evacuate. Two other blazes – the Eaton fire in Altadena and the Hurst fire near San Fernando – have also forced people to flee. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency yesterday. Wind gusts in some areas are near 100 mph. The National Weather Service warned the windstorm is likely to be the most destructive in over a decade.
NWS/NOAA
Eric Thayer/Getty Images
Southern California usually gets some rain over the colder months, but just 0.29 inches of rain has fallen in L.A. since May of last year. On top of that, the area saw record-breaking heat over the summer, so conditions are exceptionally dry. “Locally record hot summer followed by a near-record dry fall followed by the strongest wind event in 14 years,” said Anthony Edwards, a meteorologist at the San Francisco Chronicle. “Energized power lines strung across a landscape that is home to tens of millions of people. Disaster recipe.” Some firefighters reported hydrants were not supplying water. The NWS issued a warning for extremely critical fire weather for Wednesday. Some 200,000 people are without power. “Hell of a way to start a new year,” Gov. Newsom said.
President-elect Donald Trump held a lengthy press conference at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, repeating some familiar climate and energy falsehoods and trotting out a few new ones. Trump threatened again to reverse President Biden’s newly-announced offshore drilling ban and the non-existent EV “mandate,” and also hinted at trying to ban the construction of new wind turbines. He took the opportunity to lament electric heaters because he said they make you “scratch and itch,” as well as low-flow shower heads because “no water comes out.” There is no time like the present to peruse Heatmap’s extensive fact-check of Trump’s climate and energy claims.
The Biden administration rolled out the pièce de résistance of its Inflation Reduction Act tax credits yesterday, publishing the final rules for its overhaul of the clean energy subsidies at the heart of both the bill and United States alternative energy policy going back decades. The final rules define what sources of energy are eligible for production and investment tax credits (known as 45Y and 48E) by lumping together all zero-emissions energy sources into one big group of winners and then letting developers choose which credit they want to use.
The tax credits cover “wind, solar, hydropower, marine and hydrokinetic, geothermal, nuclear,” according to a Treasury Department release, as well as “certain waste energy recovery property” (heat from buildings), and sets out a process for determining how combustion-dependent sources such as biogas, biomass, and natural gas derived from sources like cow manure could qualify. And unlike the tax credits they replaced, which had fixed time periods they were in effect, the tech neutral credits either begin phasing out in 2032 or when electricity sector greenhouse gas emissions are a quarter of their 2022 level, whichever comes second. “With Trump set to take office again in less than two weeks, these rules will be cast into doubt almost as soon as they’re rolled out,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin. “So the administration is trying to cast the tax credits as a money-saving proposition for energy consumers — especially households — and a spur for investment across the country.”
Fossil fuel giant Exxon Mobil is suing California Attorney General Rob Bonta and some environmental groups, alleging they participated in a conspiracy to defame the firm and hurt its business. In recent lawsuits against Exxon, Bonta and the groups – including the Sierra Club – have accused the oil company of lying to the public about the recyclability of plastic (which, if you didn’t know, is mostly made from fossil fuels). Exxon now says those accusations were false and defamatory. “This is another attempt from Exxon Mobil to deflect attention from its own unlawful deception,” a spokesperson for the California Department of Justice toldGrist. “The attorney general is proud to advance his lawsuit against Exxon Mobil and looks forward to vigorously litigating this case in court.” The Sierra Club called the lawsuit a “shameless attempt at intimidation.”
Car manufacturers in Europe are looking to “pool” their emissions and buy credits from major electric vehicle companies as a workaround to comply with the EU’s new emissions rules, Reutersreported. Companies including Ford, Toyota, Stellantis, and Subaru are looking to pool their emissions, and then buy surplus carbon credits from Tesla; Mercedes is eyeing a similar initiative with Polestar. The EU’s new rules, which came into effect on January 1, mean carmakers have to reduce emissions by 15% compared to 2021, or face steep fines. Many manufacturers called for the rules to be eased or delayed due to sluggish EV demand.
A recent report from the Department of Energy found that about 90% of wind turbine parts and “wind systems” can be recycled.
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On the IEA’s latest report, wildfires in North Carolina, and EV adoption
Current conditions: A wildfire in New Jersey’s Wharton State Forest has burned 2,300 acres • An ancient Roman bridge collapsed in central Spain after extreme rainfall from four consecutive storms • Los Angeles could see record-breaking March heat today with temperatures nearing 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
The ballooning price tag of President Trump’s tax cut wishlist and preliminary budget negotiations on the Hill are pointing toward a budgetary showdown in which many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s benefits could become fiscal casualties. D.C. veterans, including former GOP Hill staff, tell Heatmap that even the most bipartisan parts of the IRA could be sacrificed in the budget reconciliation process in order to make room for Trump’s biggest legislative priorities, including extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security, and removing the cap on the state and local tax liability deductions.
The Congressional Budget Office, as well as third-party groups like the Tax Foundation and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, have estimated that an extension of the 2017 tax cuts would cost between $3.7 and $4.5 trillion through 2034. If all of Trump’s additional proposed tax cuts were enacted, the cost would jump to $6.8 trillion, according to Penn Wharton. Congress is still at the beginning of the reconciliation process. The next step is for the House and Senate to negotiate a topline number and issue instructions to the committees that will write the final bill on the levels of spending they’re allowed to include.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo and Jael Holzman explain, the dollar amount assigned to each committee is a ceiling, and it’s calculated on a net basis. So if the Ways and Means committee, which oversees tax legislation, is assigned a $4.5 trillion deficit ceiling, as it was in the version of the reconciliation instructions that recently passed the House, it’s going to have to find several trillion dollars worth of spending programs to cut. Fully repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits — which, according to new modeling from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, would raise about $850 billion — will start to look harder to avoid.
Major wildfires erupted in the Carolinas over the weekend, burning more than 4,000 acres and threatening some areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Helene six months ago. Debris from hurricanes makes already battered areas more vulnerable to fires, Colleen Hagerty wrote for Heatmap in the aftermath of Helene. And as Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote more recently, researchers are pointing to the South as a new area of wildfire concern.
South Carolina’s governor declared a state of emergency Saturday as the Table Rock fire spread to cover 300 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, prompting evacuations. In North Carolina, several large fires are raging out of control in Polk County, southeast of Ashville, where last year’s Hurricane Helene brought devastating floods and debris. Much of Polk County is enduring drought conditions. High winds, dry vegetation, and low humidity are fueling the fires, but response efforts are also hampered by steep terrain and hurricane debris that has yet to be cleared. Mandatory evacuations were in effect for some parts of Polk County.
A home destroyed in a fire in North Carolina.Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Global energy demand rose by 2.2% last year, faster than the average pace seen over the past decade or so, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review 2025 report. The rise was led mostly by the power sector as record warmth meant greater need for air conditioning, especially in emerging and developing countries. “Nearly all of the rise in electricity demand was met by low-emissions sources,” the report said, with renewables and nuclear providing 80% of the growth in global electricity generation. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose last year (by 0.8%) but at a slower rate than in 2023. “The global increase of 300 million tonnes of CO2 was influenced by record high temperatures,” the report said. “If weather in 2024 had remained consistent with 2023, itself the second-hottest year on record, about half of the increase in global emissions would have been avoided.”
In case you missed it: We now know which grants the Environmental Protection Agency has canceled. A document the EPA shared with the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives. Here’s the full list of grants, by program.
A new study finds that political views remain a key factor in determining whether someone chooses to buy an electric vehicle. The report, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined new EV registration data at a county level between 2012 and 2023 and found that during those years, the scale of the EV market expanded, yet nearly half of all sales were in the 10% most Democratic counties. Researchers controlled for other factors, such as income and gas prices, and still, the strong correlation between political ideology and EV adoption remains. And it hasn’t decreased over time. “We find little evidence that the U.S. EV market has broadened across the political spectrum from 2012 to 2023,” the researchers say. There were some exceptions, though: EV trucks and vans are “significantly less concentrated” in left-leaning counties compared to electric cars and SUVs.
California now has nearly 50% more EV chargers than it does gas pumps. According to the California Energy Commission, there are roughly 178,000 EV chargers in the state, compared with approximately 120,000 gas nozzles.
As Republicans’ budget priorities stack up, the numbers are starting to turn against America’s landmark climate law.
Since Donald Trump was reelected president, the climate community has retained a kind of fragile optimism about the Inflation Reduction Act, the historic climate law enacted in 2022 that Trump has vowed to repeal. The oft-repeated mantra is that the IRA is stimulating billions of dollars in investment in red districts, so why would Republicans want to put that at risk? Even if parts of the legislation were killed, surely some of it would remain intact.
But recent events have shifted the calculus. The ballooning price tag of Trump’s tax cut wishlist and preliminary budget negotiations on the Hill are pointing toward a budgetary showdown in which many of the law’s benefits could become fiscal casualties. D.C. veterans, including former GOP Hill staff, say that even the most bipartisan parts of the IRA could be sacrificed.
The reason has to do with the rules of budget reconciliation, the process Republicans in the House and Senate will use to carry out Trump’s agenda over the next several months and the same process Democrats used to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. One of Trump’s biggest legislative priorities is extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, much of which expires at the end of this year. He also wants to make good on campaign promises to eliminate taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security, and remove the cap on the state and local tax liability deductions.
To do this through the normal legislative process would subject the bill to a potential filibuster in the Senate, which would require 60 votes to override, a margin Senate Republicans lack. Budget reconciliation, however, requires only a simple majority. But there’s a catch: The bill can only contain policies that modify federal spending or revenues. It cannot contain a single provision that doesn’t pertain to the federal budget. And before lawmakers can decide what policies to put in it, they must agree on how much the bill will affect the federal budget. Once they set that topline number, they can’t change it.
“Reconciliation math is at least as important as the merits of reconciliation policies,” Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, told Heatmap. Flint was previously a Republican staff director on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and top government affairs executive at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “I think a lot of people with specific interests in the tax code fail to look at the scale of the issue that tax writers have to deal with,” he said, adding that whether IRA money has been spent in a given district will probably be a “second or third order factor” in that representative’s vote.
Congress is still at the beginning of the reconciliation process. The next step is for the House and Senate to negotiate a topline number and issue instructions to the committees that will write the final bill on the levels of spending they’re allowed to include. That’s where the punishing math for the IRA comes in. The Congressional Budget Office, as well as third-party groups like the Tax Foundation and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, have estimated that an extension of the 2017 tax cuts would cost between $3.7 and $4.5 trillion through 2034. If all of Trump’s additional proposed tax cuts were enacted, the cost would jump to $6.8 trillion, according to Penn Wharton.
The dollar amount assigned to each committee is a ceiling, and it’s calculated on a net basis. So if the Ways and Means committee, which oversees tax legislation, is assigned a $4.5 trillion deficit ceiling, as it was in the version of the reconciliation instructions that recently passed the House, it’s going to have to find several trillion dollars worth of spending programs to cut. Fully repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits — which, according to new modeling from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, would raise about $850 billion — will start to look harder to avoid.
In a recent talk hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, Jason Smith, a representative from Missouri and Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, indicated that his party was committed to achieving Trump’s entire agenda through reconciliation. “These are items that he campaigned on, and these are items that will be addressed in any tax package that we move forward on,” he said.
Tax credits related to electric vehicles and green buildings are already almost certainly on the chopping block, but cutting those would raise just $300 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. Lawmakers have other options to achieve significant deficit reductions without fully eliminating the IRA, however. The Tax Foundation’s analysis found that Congress could preserve the nuclear power production tax credit and the carbon capture tax credit — two IRA provisions many Republicans support — as well as a stripped-down version of the renewable energy production tax credit and still raise a respectable $750 billion.
Alex Brill, a former Republican chief economist to the Ways and Means Committee and current fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Heatmap that we might see efforts to “rightsize” or “reform” certain tax credits rather than repeal them. Lawmakers could keep the clean electricity tax credits in place for a few more years as an apparent compromise, for example, but phase them out in 2029 or 2030, which is when the Congressional Budget Office estimates they’ll start to be more heavily utilized, and therefore more expensive.
“There’s this possibility that they may be looking at the timing and the duration of some of these provisions,” Brill said.
The IRA prescribes no end date for those credits, which as of now will stay in place until U.S. electricity emissions fall to 25% below their 2022 levels. Jason Clark, the former chief strategist at the American Clean Power Association, told Jael in October that an earlier phase-out would drastically undercut U.S. renewables deployment. “I don’t think a lot of folks appreciate just how long-range some of this planning is — how long it takes to permit something, how long it takes to figure out the interconnection queue. Companies aren’t just thinking, what are we going to build this year? They’re thinking, what will be put online in 2035? So if the government changes the stability of that, companies start to pull back.”
There is another scenario on the table that could save a significant chunk of the IRA, but it would come with its own nontrivial drawbacks.
Republican leaders in the Senate are trying to change the baseline against which all of these budget calculations are made. They argue that the tax cut extensions should be viewed as avoiding a tax increase, not enacting a new tax cut. By this logic, the extensions don’t cost anything, and $6.8 trillion in total tax cuts looks more like $2.8 trillion. That would give Republicans more room to increase spending on a range of other priorities, including defense and immigration enforcement, without having to make tough trade-offs.
This has never been done before, and to call it controversial would be an understatement. Deficit hawks on both sides of the aisle oppose the maneuver, calling it a “gimmick” and “magic math.” A recent Politico article declared that moving to a current policy baseline approach would “break the Senate, upend the federal budget process and explode the national debt.”
Before Republicans can move ahead, they need guidance from the Senate Parliamentarian, an advisor to the Senate tasked with interpreting the rules that govern the body. If the Parliamentarian doesn’t approve, the Senate is technically allowed to ignore or fire her. But this would create a new political firestorm.
Flint said that however this baseline debate plays out will tell us how much danger the IRA is facing. Brill had a slightly different perspective. He said he would expect Congress to set the topline budget resolution numbers lower if it moves ahead with this fuzzy math. But he agreed that assuming the IRA will be saved by its Republican beneficiaries fails to see the whole picture.
“They will be looking at the revenue consequences of changes, and they’ll be looking at the efficiency of these policies,” Brill said. “Are they operating as intended? Are they the size and scope and scale that seem reasonable and appropriate to lawmakers? I think they’re going to be thinking about this in a lot of different dimensions.”
While some oil and gas majors such as Exxon and Occidental have lobbied the Trump administration to keep at least some of the IRA in place, other fossil fuel industry players are trying to convince lawmakers that the clean energy tax credits do more harm than good. More than two dozen energy executives penned a letter to House and Senate leaders last week asking for a full repeal, arguing that the subsidies encourage “less efficient production,” raise costs for consumers, and increase the national debt.
But renewable energy researchers at the Rhodium Group and Energy Innovation published modeling last week making the opposite case. Rhodium found that rollbacks of power plant and vehicle emissions rules, combined with repeal of the IRA tax credits, would increase annual household energy costs by $111 to $184 in 2030, compared to keeping the law as it is. The modelers also found that energy spending throughout the industrial sector would increase by $8 billion to $14 billion from 2030 to 2035. Energy Innovation, which also modeled repeal of key tax credits, found this would lead to higher energy bills, as well as nearly 800,000 job losses in 2030.
Some D.C. figureheads are still bullish that full repeal of the IRA is unlikely. Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Heatmap he’s heard the argument that Republicans’ magic math could help the IRA, but he’s not sure there’s much there, there. “I do think that there’s strong momentum for keeping the tax credits, and honestly, I think that’s true regardless of whatever budgetary baseline they use,” he said.
Earlier this month, 21 House Republicans came out in bold, public defense of the law. This likely does not reflect the level of support latent in the party, however. Fishman said that many of the tax credits in the law historically had bipartisan support, before the Inflation Reduction Act “painted them with a partisan brush.”
“I think at the end of the day, that is actually really relevant — the fact that so many members have co-sponsored or sponsored some version of these tax credits in the past,” Fishman said.
It’s too soon to judge whether Republican support for the IRA means anything, Josh Freed, senior vice president of the climate and energy program at Third Way, told Heatmap. “IRA is uncertain until the dust settles,” he said. “It is hard to know what trade-offs are going to be asked for by the authors and by different factions within the Republican caucus until decisions on whether there needs to be pay-fors, and how much, are made.”
The timeline for when the Republican caucus will make those decisions — and set the rules of the game — is hard to predict. In that talk hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, Congressman Smith said the plan was to get the final reconciliation bill on Trump’s desk before Memorial Day.
The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.