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Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
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On IRA funds, rescissions, and EV battery technology
Current conditions: The National Weather Service is advising Americans in 11 states affected by heat waves to avoid coffee and alcohol due to dehydration risk • There have been more wildfires in London this summer than in all of 2024 • We’re at the halfway point in climatological summer and the United States’ hottest day of the year — 124 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley, California, on Monday — may now be behind us.
It has long been a “big mystery” how much grant funding from the Inflation Reduction Act the Biden administration ultimately got out the door before leaving the White House. Previously, the administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants. Still, it wasn’t until Republicans in Congress began their rescissions of the bill’s unobligated funds that a fuller picture began to emerge.
According to reporting by my colleague Emily Pontecorvo, the Biden administration spent or otherwise obligated about $61.7 billion before leaving office, with President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill clawing back $31.7 billion from 47 IRA programs. Programs that had the greatest proportion of their funding obligated include:
There’s a lot more in the data to dig through, too, which Emily does here.
Senate Republicans voted narrowly Tuesday evening to advance President Trump’s $9.4 billion rescissions package, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. Three Republican senators — Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — joined Democrats in opposing the package. Congress must vote to approve the rescissions by Friday to meet a statutory 45-day deadline that began when President Trump sent his proposal on June 3. The vote-a-rama is set to begin Thursday afternoon.
The proposed package would eliminate $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, as well as large portions of foreign assistance programs. (A controversial plan to cut $400 million from the country’s AIDS relief program, known as PEPFAR, was ultimately removed to convince Republican holdouts.) But as I’ve written before, the package also takes aim at $1.7 billion of the $3.6 billion appropriated for the Economic Support Fund, which has historically been used to work with international partners to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as $125 million from the Clean Technology Fund, which provides financial resources for developing countries to invest in clean energy projects. The White House has said the programs do not “reflect America’s values or put the American people first.”
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China announced Tuesday that to protect the valuable breakthroughs that have allowed it to produce inexpensive electric vehicles, it will begin to restrict “eight key technologies for manufacturing [EV] batteries,” The New York Times reports. The move, which is effective immediately, will require a license from the Chinese government before any technologies can be transferred overseas “through trade, investment or technological cooperation.”
The move follows pressure by the European Union on Chinese EV and battery manufacturers to build factories within the bloc. As I covered in Heatmap AM yesterday, electric vehicle sales are booming in China in large part due to their affordability, with the nation being the “only large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,” BloombergNEF has found. Though lithium-ion phosphate battery technology originated in the United States more than three decades ago, Chinese companies BYD and CATL have “figured out a way to further increase the number of recharges, making it comparable to more traditional battery chemistries,” in addition to advances in mass-production and capacity, the Times adds.
The third quarter of 2025 will “likely” see record sales of electric vehicles in the United States as would-be buyers rush to use the $7,500 tax credit before it expires on September 30, Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book reported this week. Electric vehicle sales were lower in Q2 of 2025 than in 2024 by 6.3%, with 310,839 new EVs sold, marking “only the third decline on record, and a sign of a more mature market,” Stephanie Valdez Streaty, senior analyst at Cox Automotive, said in a statement. Additionally, sales of used EVs — only a third of which had qualified for government incentives anyway before those were eliminated — are up, with 100,000 units sold in Q2. But the real story will be what happens in Q3, where there’s “about to be a fire sale” as consumers race against the clock, Andrew Moseman writes for Heatmap. If you’re among the shoppers, he’s got the scoop on EV deals here.
The United States will either “reform” the International Energy Agency or “withdraw,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg Tuesday during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University. The IEA, which was originally established to focus on oil security during the 1970s, has been characterized by Republicans as becoming a “cheerleader” for the renewable energy transition, in the recent words of Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. Wright echoed those concerns in his conversation with Bloomberg, telling the publication that the IEA’s projections that oil demand will plateau this decade are “total nonsense.” Despite the threats, Wright stressed that his “strong preference” for handling the IEA is “to reform it.”
Several major beauty brands, including L’Oréal Paris and Neutrogena, are set to include environmental impact ratings on their packaging. “The EcoBeautyScore” — which runs from A to E — “indicates the environmental footprint of beauty products based on its entire lifecycle, from ingredients to packaging and how it is disposed of,” Cosmetics Business reports.
Rob does a post-vacation debrief with Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman on the One Big Beautiful Bill.
It’s official. On July 4, President Trump signed the Republican reconciliation bill into law, gutting many of the country’s most significant clean energy tax credits. The future of the American solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle industries looks very different now than it did last year.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we survey the damage and look for bright spots. What did the law, in its final version, actually repeal, and what did it leave intact? How much could still change as the Trump administration implements the law? What does this mean for U.S. economic competitiveness? And how are we feeling about the climate fight today?
Jillian Goodman, Heatmap’s deputy editor, joins us to discuss all these questions and more. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I want to ask a version of the Upshift / Downshift question of both of you, which is, how are you feeling?
Jillian Goodman: Dizzy. I’m feeling dizzy.
Jesse Jenkins: I would like a break. Yes.
Meyer: You both had your faces up against the coalface of this policy change over the past two weeks. And I’m not someone who thinks how we feel about climate change is always the most salient question. At some point of working on it professionally, I think one just kind of is like, well, this is the thing I work on, and I get up in the morning and I try to make it better, and it doesn’t really matter whether I’m optimistic or pessimistic at the moment because you just keep pushing. That’s how it works.
Jenkins: I think it’s how you survive in this game this long, is adopting an attitude like that to some degree.
Meyer: The U.S. just went through a kind of clattering change to its energy and climate policy and got rid of a number of policies that, although flawed, were pushing the U.S. energy system in the right direction, and were a real vote of confidence and of good faith in the energy transition. Has watching the events of the past two weeks made you feel pessimistic about the energy transition to come? Or are you feeling like, you know, for a world where Trump won, for a world where the U.S. faced the constraints and the political environment that it did in 2023 and 2024 and 2025, we can work with this and there’s gonna be new stuff coming down the pipeline and we’re gonna keep deploying.
Goodman: I will say, kind of similar to you, Rob, doing this work is sort of my way of processing my climate anxiety, or at least putting some kind of wall of professionalism between that climate anxiety and my daily life. Like, this is my contribution, and I think about it as a professional, and I don’t really think about it as a human as often.
I will say, it’s shocking to me how much of a … you know, it is not a 100% policy reversal, but the extent to which the government of the United States was willing to throw out its existing climate policy that took however many years and decades to get to just really kind of floors me. And it’s the kind of thing that we can’t do again, at least not in this way. It’s not that U.S. companies will never again trust a climate-oriented tax credit. I think that’s a bit of an overstatement. But this approach has been tried, and then it’s been undone. And so whatever approach is tried in the future will have to be something new, and it’ll have to be motivated by different arguments, and it will have to have different structures. And that project, I think, is also kind of daunting.
Jenkins: Yeah, so look, this is a terrible piece of policy for the United States, and for the world. And so on the one hand, I’m mad as hell about it, right? I mean, we haven’t even talked about the broader effects beyond climate of this bill. It’s going to kick nearly one in 20 Americans off of their health insurance. It’s going to explode the deficit so that we can mostly give tax cuts to wealthy people and corporations who don’t need it. It’s going to reduce food stamp spending for people who can’t afford to eat so that people who can afford first class flights can have another vacation. Like, this is just bad policy, and it is a bad way to do energy policy, to completely reverse course just because the other guy won the election, rather than to have a more thoughtful rationalization of the tax code for energy investment.
I think it’s particularly scary to think about the implications for our automotive sector, having basically replaced a pretty thoughtful and fairly successful domestic industrial strategy around EVs and batteries with basically nothing except for some subsidies that build a wall around the United States is really concerning.I don’t know that we’re gonna have a globally relevant auto industry in five years …
Mentioned:
The REPEAT Project report on what the OBBBA will mean for the future of American emissions
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s foreign entities of concern explainer
The new White House executive order about renewables tax credits
And here’s more of Heatmap’s coverage from the endgame of OBBBA.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
The Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online clean energy programs equip you with tangible skills and powerful networks—and you can continue working while learning. In just five hours a week, propel your career and make a difference.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
When Congress rescinded unobligated funds from the historic climate law, it inadvertently answered a question climate advocates have been asking for months.
The Biden administration left office without ever disclosing how much of the historic climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act it had spent.
Politico reached out to every federal agency in November in an attempt to answer that question and could only conclude that it was a “big mystery.” The administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants created by the IRA, the outlet found, but the amount that had been obligated — meaning legally committed and therefore, at least in theory, protected — remained largely unknown.
That continued to be true right up until the legislative process for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. In addition to overhauling the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, Republicans in Congress rescinded the unobligated funds from 47 of the law’s more than 80 climate and environmental programs. According to scores from the Congressional Budget Office, $31.7 billion of the $93.4 billion for those programs, or about 34%, was left.
That means the Biden administration spent or contracted out about two-thirds of the funding from these programs. The data puts into focus what the ultimate effects and outcomes of the Inflation Reduction Act will be over the coming decades — or rather, what they could be, if the Trump administration upholds existing contracts. Whether the administration must honor these agreements is the subject of several ongoing lawsuits.
But we can see, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency, which had the largest appropriation from the IRA of any agency, obligated the vast majority of that money to states, tribes, nonprofits, and other beneficiaries. Billions of dollars to monitor and address air pollution in low-income communities and at schools, to phase down planet-warming refrigerants and transition to next-generation technologies, and to help states build out and implement their climate action plans should theoretically be flowing into the economy, so long as the contracts are ultimately honored. The entirety of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was obligated, and while the EPA has attempted to claw back roughly $20 billion of that — a process that has been held up in the courts — the $7 billion set aside for a low-income solar program called Solar For All is actively funding new projects around the country.
The agency under Biden was less successful in standing up a series of programs designed to advance greenhouse gas emissions reporting. Initiatives to improve the labeling systems for low-carbon construction materials and to standardize corporate emissions reporting never really got off the ground.
The Department of Agriculture was also an efficient spender. While the data shows it had obligated only about $7 billion of the more than $18 billion allocated for climate-focused conservation programs, only $10 billion of the funding was actually available for the department to use by the time Biden left office. On the one hand, that means it awarded 70% of the available funds. On the other, that means Congress has now evaporated a whopping $11 billion that could have been disbursed.
The Forest Service, which is under the USDA, also deployed more than $2 billion, or about 93% of its funding for National Forest restoration, urban forestry, and climate mitigation grants for private forest owners.
There are limitations to the data. It shows that the Department of Energy only spent about 39% of its funding, but because the Budget Office did not break out the rescissions by program, we can’t see how far along the agency got with each one, or how much of each was clawed back. The data can also be somewhat misleading, as several of the programs provide loans and loan guarantees, while the OBBB only rescinded “credit subsidies,” i.e. money to cover the costs of this lending service. In other words, this doesn’t tell us much about how much Biden’s Loan Programs Office accomplished. But in this case the office’s website helps fill out the picture: It lists 23 active loans that were made after the IRA passed, worth nearly $58 billion. (The IRA appropriated about $11.7 billion in credit subsidies to the Loan Programs Office.)
I also put together a list of programs that Congress did not rescind, as they show which IRA creations the GOP either deemed worthwhile or too depleted, a.k.a. obligated, to be worth the effort. Several big-ticket items jump out. As I’ve previously written, two rebate programs for home efficiency improvements remain intact, although most of the $8.8 billion in funding is currently paused. Drought mitigation, water access, and tribal electrification and climate resilience grants were also untouched. A $3 billion EPA program to reduce air pollution at ports made it through the gambit after an initial House draft of the OBBB had proposed killing it.
Republicans in Congress also preserved a nearly $10 billion program to help rural electric cooperatives invest in clean energy and energy efficiency. Rural coops disproportionately rely on coal-fired power plants, burdening their members with higher energy prices and dirtier air. While the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is a major advocate for coal power and has applauded Trump’s moves to boost it, the group also championed the rural clean energy program, with its CEO telling E&E News last fall that the program was oversubscribed and that “there is an appetite for investing in clean energy.”
To be sure, the question of whether and to what extent the Trump administration will disburse previously obligated funds or continue to spend down the remaining programs is a big one. But the supposition that the OBBB “killed” the IRA is also not really accurate. Between obligated funds and the programs that weren’t rescinded, more than $105 billion could still flow into the economy to fight climate change.