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Nepal’s rhino conservation efforts have been, if anything, too successful.
Ganesh Paudel packs a wad of chewing tobacco as he talks about the rhinoceros attack. “When the rhino charged, we were in a boat,” he tells me. “The rhino was sitting in the water, then it hit me and broke my knee, broke the hand of another guide and gored a tourist” — he points — “through an eye.”
As we chat, another rhino wades in a stream just a short way away. Paudel works as a nature guide, but we’re not in nature today — we’re standing under a bridge that connects to a busy highway in Chitwan, a district of about a million people situated on the outskirts of Nepal’s Chitwan National Park. A school bus passes and a few locals stop their scooters to whip out phones and film. But most keep moving without looking twice.
Rhinos once roamed from Pakistan to Bangladesh, but their numbers plummeted in the 20th century. Many cultures throughout Asia believe rhino horns have medicinal properties, making the creatures they’re attached to vulnerable to poaching. Rajas and royals prized rhinos as trophy kills. Farmers, also, retaliated with violence against rhinos that pillaged their crops. By 1970 there were just 95 rhinos in the national park, a wilderness bigger than New York City.
Eventually, however, the government realized that wildlife protection attracts dollars. For decades now, the United States Agency for International Development and non-governmental organizations like the World Wildlife Fund have supported Nepal’s efforts to boost conservation and lessen human wildlife conflict. Between 2011 and 2020 alone, $57 million of USAID funding went to programs aimed at protecting biodiversity here. Soldiers now patrol the park to stifle poaching.
But while the rhino population has rebounded to nearly 700 in Chitwan, the animals themselves are hardly thriving. As temperatures rise, there's been less rain during monsoon season. Warming temperatures have fueled invasive species like American creeper vines that have taken over rhino habitat and grow three inches daily. Climate change has also dried up staple rhino foods like elephant grass and aquatic plants. Now, there are too many rhinos and not enough forest, which forces the animals out of the park and into the city. (The same goes for tigers.)
The particular rhino wading near us is named Meghauli. Each morning, like clockwork, he comes out of the forest and into town. Meghauli is a bona fide social media star. When he thuds down the road traffic stops and a parade of hypnotized Nepalis and foreigners snap selfies and touch his leathery hide.
Meghauli was hand-raised by park staff after he was found alone, wounded from a tiger attack. Fed on 18 liters of buffalo milk a day, he grew big and strong — and also lost his fear of humans. Four years later he was released, but he kept returning because it’s easier to find food in town than in the increasingly dry and crowded jungle.
Rhinos are everywhere in the populated regions around the park — wading in streams, but also painted in murals, memorialized in hotel names, and depicted in statues. The uncomfortable truth is that the rhinos’ plight has also created a lucrative tourist opportunity. Rajendra Dhami, who runs a tea shop in front of Meghauli’s main crossing point, a shallow river with basking crocodiles and waiting tourists, tells me the rhinos have become a big attraction. “People come to see rhinos since we have them,” he says. “That means more money for us.”
A pair of young Brits and an Indian family of nine are currently gathered, waiting for Meghauli, but Dhami insists that for the most part, it doesn’t matter which rhino shows up. “We have lots of problems in Nepal,” he tells me, “but we share with wildlife.”
It’s true visitors often choose hotels and shops near wildlife. But a recent 20-year study found that nature-based tourism rarely impacts locals, in part because hotel bookings are often made online with fancy tour operators who act as middlemen and skim off revenue much the same way food delivery sites take from restaurants. Meanwhile, just six of the 93 hotels here are owned or managed by indigenous people, according to the Regional Hotel Association Chitwan. For most Nepalis, especially in poor indigenous communities who rely on farming here, rhinos running around is bad for bottom lines — and bellies.
“Cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes, rhinos like it all very much” says Narayan Rijal, who has worked as a park guide for 15 years. ”That’s the problem.”
But people, also, are hungry. Many here are in such need of food that they’re invading rhino habitat to find fruits, honey, and meat. Impoverished communities illegally enter the park to gather firewood, a cycle that increases deforestation, shrinks habitat, and risks deadly rhino, elephant, and tiger attacks.
Tulsi Magar, a guide at the local Sanctuary hotel, says many attacks are because farmers are so desperate to protect their own food that they stand their ground and light fires to try and scare off hungry rhinos. When Magar was 12, he also fought this way, sleeping in a shed and narrowly avoiding losing his life to protect the family’s radish harvest.
“It didn’t work,’ he remembers. “The rhinos won.”
Soldiers try their best to manage the rhinos, trailing them as they leave the park to forage in farmers’ fields. Once they reach town, soldiers often have to hit them with sticks or their rifle butts to get them to return to the forest.
“They‘re not small animals,” an assistant warden says as a rooster crows outside his office. “We try to push rhinos back into the core area. With Meghauli no need for stick, we just push. We do our best.”
Meghauli has a lookalike named Madi, another rescue. Unlike Meghauli, Madi is angry, park staff say, asking me to avoid using their names for fear of speaking openly. “Madi even charged a few taxis by the airport,” they admit. “He’s very aggressive.”
Rhinos have killed 55 people since 1998, including a 2019 attack on safari-going tourists. Last year alone, rhinos killed five. “They’re more dangerous than tigers,” notes Isswari Chapagain who has climbed trees to avoid charges.
Rhinos aren’t just a threat to locals, he says. They’re also a threat to each other. Wild rhinos go nuts and attack orphans like Meghauli and Madi if they smell people on them — another reason they keep coming back to town.
As the park has become famous and rhinos have rebounded, human activities like road expansion have been linked to a string of strange deaths: 165 rhinos killed from falling into roadside ditches and septic tanks, shocks from electric fences, disease (likely from proximity to livestock), and at least six killed by poachers. In 2022 alone, 36 rhinos died from territorial fights, which are also connected to warming temperatures and habitat loss. Construction on Chitwan’s three main rivers changes their flow, shrinks space, increases food competition and pushes rhinos into fields.
Rhinos are protected even if they attack or leave the park boundaries, but people aren’t. If they’re attacked in the park, Nepalis can claim government compensation (although guides cannot). If they’re at home protecting their farms and a rhino mauls them, they get nothing, another reason researchers accuse the government of continuing to prioritize wildlife over people.
Back under the bridge, I watch Meghauli blow bubbles under the water, just like a kid.
When he rises, I see his massive body in full for the first time. He seems gentle but it wouldn’t take much — a jerk of his head or a kick from a leg — for him to kill someone. He exits the water and trudges up the riverbank, then pauses to scan the highway. He faces me and sniffs the air, then turns toward a potato field. It’s lunchtime.
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On striking down the California waiver, the tax bill, and BYD
Current conditions: Showers and thunderstorms in the South and cool weather in the Northeast will make Memorial Day weekend “more reminiscent of late March than late May”• At least four people are dead and 50,000 stranded in New South Wales, Australia, due to torrential rainfall that is expected to ease Friday evening• Evacuation orders are in place around Oracle, Arizona, to the north of Tucson, due to the growing Cody Fire.
It’s official: After weeks of speculation and run-up, the Senate voted 51 to 44 on Thursday to overturn California’s waiver from the Clean Air Act to set stricter-than-federal emissions limits on cars and trucks. The vote was along party lines, with the exception of Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who joined Republicans in passing the disapproval resolution under the Congressional Review Act. California required companies to stop selling new gas vehicles by 2035, which Republicans had criticized as an “electric vehicle mandate” due to the size of the state and its influence over the automotive market.
The Senate’s parliamentarian and the Government Accountability Office had determined that the Senate could not use the CRA to prevent California from setting stricter emissions standards, as it has done since 1967, because the waiver is not a federal rule and therefore not subject to a simple 50-vote threshold repeal vote. To get around the technicality, Republicans voted Wednesday night on what Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse called the “double nuclear option” — essentially declaring they were “within their rights to skirt a filibuster and muscle through measures to deny” California its unique emissions-setting authority, The New York Times writes. But that also means the door is now open “to challenges against all sorts of other federal program waivers — without having to worry about the Senate filibuster,” Capitol Hill correspondent Jamie Dupree wrote in his newsletter Thursday, adding, “it certainly is a substantial change in the precedents of the Senate. And now it’s the new regular order.” California Governor Gavin Newsom called the vote “illegal” and vowed to “fight this unconstitutional attack on California in court.”
We’re continuing to track the repercussions of the House reconciliation bill that passed early Thursday morning, including its “full-frontal assault on the residential solar business model,” in the words of my colleague Matthew Zeitlin. Though an earlier draft of the bill shortened the availability of the Residential Clean Energy Credit, 25D, for people who purchased home solar systems from 2034 to expiring at the end of this year, Matthew explains that the new language says no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.” That’s “how you kill a business model in legislative text,” Matthew continues. The repercussions were immediate: By midday, shares of Sunrun were already down $37.5%, an erasure of almost $1 billion.
For the first time, BYD has outsold Tesla in Europe. In April, the Chinese automaker sold 7,231 electric vehicles, up 169% from the year prior, while Tesla sold 7,165 EVs, down 49% in the same period, Bloomberg reports based on market research by Jato Dynamics.
As we covered in AM earlier this month, the first quarter of 2025 was the second-best month ever for BEV sales in the European Union, despite “the name Tesla [becoming] toxic for so many, limiting its appeal,” Clean Technica wrote at the time. But while BYD marked a milestone in beating the American automaker, it remained in the 10th spot overall for electric vehicle sales, with Volkswagen the clear winner for the month with 23,514 sales. But BYD is “about to reinforce its EV lineup in Europe with the Dolphin Surf, a fully electric hatchback that will sell for” around $22,700 in Germany until the end of June, Bloomberg writes.
NOAA
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its forecast for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, with a higher estimated upper limit for named storms than earlier predictions from private forecasters. According to NOAA, we can expect between 13 and 19 named storms this year, of which six to 10 could become hurricanes and three to five could develop into major Category 3 or higher hurricanes. That puts the season on track to be more active than the average Atlantic hurricane season, when 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes can be expected.
Private forecasters also rely on NOAA data to inform their predictions, but arrived at slightly different conclusions. Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences forecasts 17 named storms for 2025, while AccuWeather predicts 13 to 18 named storms. Though the Atlantic has cooled slightly from its historic highs last year, it is still warmer than usual — part of what is spurring the above-average estimates for the season. Still, as I’ve reported, there are lingering concerns about the reliability of NOAA’s data in future years as the agency hemorrhages the personnel who repair the sensors that monitor sea temperatures or run quality control on the data.
Microsoft announced its commitment to purchase nearly 623,000 metric tons of low-carbon cement from the startup Sublime Systems on Thursday. The contract, which runs over a six- to nine-year period, is intended to “reduce emissions — both at Microsoft and globally,” Jeff Leeper, the vice president of global datacenter construction at Microsoft, said in a press release about the deal. The company aims to use the cement on its construction projects “when geographically possible,” including incorporating it in data centers, office buildings, and other infrastructure. The companies declined to share how much the deal was worth, Bloomberg writes.
My colleague Emily Pontecorvo profiled Sublime earlier this year, noting that cement is a significant source of carbon emissions — 8% of the global total — due to a chemical reaction with limestone kilns required for production. But Sublime has “developed a new way to make reactive lime that does not require limestone,” Emily explains. “Instead of heating up rocks in a kiln, they drive the chemical process with electric currents. This enables the company to avoid limestone and use a variety of other raw materials that do not contain carbon to produce lime.” The company is working to construct its first 30,000-ton commercial plant, which is expected to be completed in 2027.
Pakistan imported 22 gigawatts of solar panels in 2024, more than the entire country of Canada. “That’s not a typo or a spreadsheet rounding error. That’s the kind of number that turns heads at IEA meetings and makes policy analysts double-check their databases,”Clean Technica writes.
Investing in red states doesn’t make defying Trump any safer.
In the end, it was what the letters didn’t say.
For months — since well before the 2024 election — when asked about the future health and safety of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, advocates and industry folks would point to the 20 or so House Republicans (sometimes more, sometimes fewer) who would sign on to public statements urging their colleagues to preserve at least some of the law. Better not to pull out the rug from business investment, they argued. Especially not investment in their districts.
These letters were “reassuring to a lot of folks in clean energy and climate communities,” Chris Moyer, the founder of Echo Communications and a former staffer for longtime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told me.
“I never felt reassured,” Moyer added.
Plenty of people did, though. The home solar company Sunrun, for instance, told investors in a presentation earlier this monththat a “growing number of Republicans in Congress — including 39 overall House members and four Senators — publicly support maintaining energy tax credits through various letters over the past few months.” The company added that “we expect a range of draft proposals to be issued, possibly including draconian scenarios, but we expect any extreme proposals will be moderated as they progress.”
Instead, the draft language got progressively worse for the residential solar industry, with the version that passed the House Thursday morning knocking billions of dollars off the sector, as tax credits were further squeezed to help make room for other priorities that truly posed an existential threat to the bill’s passage.
What Sunrun and others appear to have failed to notice — or at least publicly acknowledge — is that while these representatives wanted to see tax credits preserved, they never specified what they would do if their wishes were disregarded. Unlike the handful of Republicans who threatened to tank the bill over expanding the deduction for state and local taxes (each of whom signed one of the tax credit letters, at some point), or the Freedom Caucus, who tend to vote no on any major fiscal bill that doesn’t contain sizable spending cuts (so, until now, every budget bill), the tax credit Republicans never threatened to kill the bill entirely.
Ultimately, the only Republicans to outright oppose the bill did so because it didn’t cut the deficit enough. All of the House Republicans who signed letters or statements in support of clean energy tax credits voted yes on the legislation, with a single exception: New York’s Andrew Garbarino, who reportedly slept through the roll call. (He later said he would have voted for it had he been awake.)
“The coalition of interests effectively persuaded Republican members that tax credits were driving investment in their districts and states,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me in a text message. “Where advocates fell short was in convincing them that preserving energy tax credits — especially for mature technologies Republicans often view skeptically — should take precedence over preventing Medicaid cuts or addressing parochial concerns like SALT.”
The Inflation Reduction Act itself was, after all, advanced on a party-line basis, as was Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Combined, those two bills received a single Democratic no vote and no Republican yes votes.
In the end, Moyer said, Republican House members in the current Congress were under immense political pressure to support what is likely to be the sole major piece of legislation advanced this year by President Trump — one that contained a number of provisions, especially on SALT, that they agreed with.
“There are major consequences for individual house members who vote against the president’s agenda,” Moyer said. “They made a calculation. They knew they were going to take heat either way. They would rather take heat from clean energy folks and people affected by the projects.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
White House officials and outside analysts frequently touted job creation linked to IRA investments in Republican House districts and states as a tangible benefit of the law that would make it politically impossible to overturn, even as Congress and the White House turned over.
“President’s Biden’s policies are leading to more than 330,000 new clean energy jobs already created, more than half of which are in Republican-held districts,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told reporters last year, previewing a speech President Biden would give on climate change.
Even after Biden had been defeated, White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi told Bloomberg that “we have grown the political consensus around the Inflation Reduction Act through its execution,” citing one of the House Republican letters in support of the clean energy tax credits.
One former Biden White House climate official told me that having projects in Republican districts was thought by the IRA’s crafters to make the bill more politically sustainable — but only so much.
“A [freaking] battery factory is not going to save democracy,” the official told me, referencing more ambitious claims that the tax credits could lead to more Democratic electoral victories. (The official asked to remain anonymous in order not to jeopardize their current professional prospects.) Instead, “it was supposed to make it slightly harder for Republicans to overturn the subsidies.”
Congresspeople worried about jobs weren’t supposed to be the only things that would preserve the bill, either, the official added. Clean energy and energy-dependent sectors, they thought, should be able to effectively advocate for themselves.
To the extent that business interests were able to win a hearing with House Republicans, they were older, more traditionally conservative industries such as nuclear, manufacturing, agriculture, and oil and gas.The biofuels industry (i.e. liquid Big Agriculture) won an extension of its tax credit, 45Z. The oil and gas industry’s favored measure, the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration, was minimally fettered. Nuclear power was the one sector whose treatment notably improved between the initial draft from the House’s tax-writing committee and the version voted on Thursday. Advanced nuclear facilities can still claim tax credits if they start construction by 2029, while other clean energy projects have to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be in service by the end of 2028.
“I think these outcomes are unsurprising. In places where folks consistently engaged, things were protected,” a Republican lobbyist told me, referring to manufacturing, biofuels, and nuclear power, requesting anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. “But assuming a project in a district would guarantee a no vote on a large package was always a mistake.”
“The relative success of nuclear is a testament to the importance of having strong champions — predictable but notable show of political might,” a second Republican lobbyist told me, who was also not allowed to speak publicly about the bill.
But all hope isn’t lost yet. The Senate still has to pass something that the House will agree with. Some senators had made noises about how nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal were treated in the initial language.
“Budget reconciliation is, first and foremost, a fiscal exercise,” Venkatakrishnan told me. “Energy tax credits offer a path of least resistance for hitting lawmakers’ fiscal targets. As the Senate takes up this bill, the case must be made that the marginal $100 billion to $200 billion in cuts seriously jeopardizes grid reliability and energy innovation.” Whether that will be enough to generate meaningful opposition in the Senate, however, is the $600 billion question.
A loophole created by the House Ways and Means text disappeared in the final bill.
Early this morning, the House of Representatives launched a full-frontal assault on the residential solar business model. The new language in the budget reconciliation bill to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed Thursday included even tighter restrictions on the tech-neutral investment tax credits claimed by businesses like Sunrun when they lease solar systems to residential buyers.
While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”
This is how you kill a business model in legislative text.
“Expect shares of solar companies to take a significant step back,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning, calling the exclusion “scathing.” Investors are “losing the now false sense of security that we had 'seen the worst' of it with the initial House draft.”
Joseph Osha, an analyst for Guggenheim, agrees. “Considering the fact that ~70% of the residential solar industry is now supported by third-party (e.g. lease or PPA) financing arrangements, the new language is disastrous for the residential solar industry,” he wrote in a note to clients. “We believe the near-term implications are very negative for Sunrun, Enphase, and SolarEdge.”
Shares of Sunrun are down 37.5% in mid-day trading, wiping off almost $1 billion worth of value for its shareholders. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Shares of fellow residential solar inverter and systems Enphase are down 20%, while residential solar technology company SolarEdge’s shares are down 24.5%.
“Families will lose the freedom to control their energy costs,” Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement, in reference to the last-minute alteration to the investment tax credit.
When the House Ways and Means Committee released the initial language getting rid of 25D by the end of this year but keeping a limited version of the investment tax credit, analysts noted that Sunrun was an unexpected winner from the bill. It typically markets its solar products as leases or power purchase agreements, not outright sales of the system.
The reversal, Dumoulin-Smith wrote, “comes as a surprise especially considering how favorable the initial markup was” to the Sunrun business model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
The new bill, Dumoulin-Smith writes is “‘leveling the playing field’ by targeting all future residential solar originations, whether leased or owned.” The bill is “negative to Sunrun with intentional targeting of the sector.
Last year, Sunrun generated over $700 million from transferring investment tax credits from its solar and storage projects. The company said that it had $117 million of “incentives revenue” in 2024, which includes the tax credits, out of around $1.4 billion in total revenue.
But the tax credits play a far larger role in the business than just how they’re recognized on the company’s earnings statements. The company raises investment funds to help finance the projects, where investors get payments from customers as well as monetized tax credits. Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. Conversely, the financing “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote to clients that “this is a noteworthy change for the residential solar industry, and Sunrun in particular, which dominates the residential solar [third-party owned] market and has recognized ITC credits under 48E.”