You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Whether they can continue to do so depends on how long the green freeze lasts.
This story is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
By now I’ve come to expect the responses. “We’re continuing to assess the situation and aren’t able to speak on it at this time.” “We are not able to provide comment on this matter.” Oftentimes, all I’ll receive is a Gmail prompt to an unanswered email: Sent 9 days ago. Follow up?
This week, my colleagues and I are covering the “green freeze,” an economy-wide trend of canceled clean energy projects, a retreat from climate tech investments, and a tightening of purse strings perhaps best epitomized by Breakthrough Energy’s pullback from grantmaking and policy advocacy. I aimed to look more closely at how nonprofits are navigating the new political and economic landscape — with climate no longer a key policy focus of the White House, would related causes lose their appeal to donors? Or would the opposite be true: Given the federal funding gap, would philanthropy surge to fill the vacuum? Would it even be prudent to do so?
“In my experience, when the government takes a step back from a particular impact area — and climate is no different — often philanthropists end up leaning in,” Amy Duffuor, a co-founder and partner at Azolla Ventures, told me. Azolla invests in climate tech start-ups using both traditional venture capital and catalytic capital, the latter of which comes primarily from philanthropists. But for many organizations, especially at the grassroots level or in the environmental justice space, it might not be that simple.
Talking about donors is always delicate and awkward, but I was still surprised by how closed-lipped local and national nonprofits became when I started asking these questions. Many groups that have spoken candidly with Heatmap News in the past declined to talk to me on the topic, even on background. One media relations manager for a conservation organization that receives federal grants delicately implied, while turning down my request for comment, that no one wants to stick their neck out when there’s a climate witch-hunt going on.
“Nonprofits have to be really conscious of where their support comes from and how they protect that,” Cyrus Wadia, the CEO of Activate, a nonprofit that offers fellowship support for early-stage science entrepreneurs looking to launch climate start-ups, told me when I explained what I was seeing.
He’s right that the wariness is understandable. The Trump administration is attempting to claw back some $20 billion in funds awarded to climate nonprofits under President Joe Biden, including hundreds of grants from the Environmental Protection Agency, many of which were earmarked for local environmental justice nonprofits. A number of these nonprofits are, as a result, facing unexpected funding shortfalls, forcing them to consider cuts to staff and programs in the weeks and months ahead. “If this lasts much longer … then we’re going to start seeing more organizations saying this program and that program have to shut down, they’re having to reduce capacity because they can’t make payroll, or they’re closing their doors,” Rick Cohen, the chief communications officer for the National Council of Nonprofits, recently told The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
There is a sense among some in the nonprofit space that the hesitation among donors might be more of a reassessment than an actual freeze. “There is definitely a ‘pause and wait and see and figure out our strategy and maybe start over’ moment that I think a couple of these foundations are having,” Lara Pierpoint, the managing director of Trellis Climate — a 501(c)(3) that helps philanthropists, donors, and foundations invest in climate opportunities that wouldn’t go forward without philanthropic support — told me. A policy director for a national policymaking and advocacy group similarly suggested to me that the election of Trump caught some of their donors flat-footed, adding that they “didn’t have strategies ready to go.”
That doesn’t necessarily indicate a broader trend. “The good news is that we aren’t seeing a huge amount of change just yet among our donor set,” she told me. “I think our donor set tends to be folks who are already very focused on climate,” she went on. “They are not only not afraid of the word ‘climate,’ but I think they really see the need to focus on it, particularly given what’s going on.”
She did note, however, that it’s still early, and that there are two main headwinds she and her peers are facing. “Some of the donors that we’ve spoken to have said, ‘Hey, we can’t really talk right now or commit to anything because we’re doing a wholesale reevaluation of our portfolio and how we approach giving,’” she said. Additionally, philanthropists who think of themselves more as investors might have questions about how viable their investments will be, given what’s happening with both federal priorities and the gyrating economy.
As my colleague Katie Brigham has reported, climate tech investment had already started to slow down from the frothy days of the early Biden administration; some companies had started to pivot away from promoting the clean, green climate perks of their business models even before Trump took office. (Bloomberg has labeled this semantic game “greenhushing”; the general wisdom is, “it’s still a great time to start a climate startup. Just don’t call it a climate startup.”) Anxieties about the economy can, as a rule, also impact the giving patterns of donors.
“At the end of the day, for very good reasons, philanthropists want to invest in projects and ideas that are likely to be successful and go forward and do the things they are meant to do,” Pierpoint said. “And all of that is under threat right now because climate tech is hard, it’s expensive, it’s competing with fossil fuels, and counting out government support and tax credits, the picture is daunting.”
Others were similarly cautiously optimistic about the days ahead. “There’s a gap, and philanthropy is often well-suited to close gaps,” said Duffuor, the partner at Azolla Ventures. (Both Azolla Ventures and Trellis Climate are part of Prime Coalition, a nonprofit focused on climate financing.)
Like Pierpoint, Duffuor expects to see a “doubling down” by philanthropists who are motivated by climate. Donors who were more on the cusp to begin with — who saw climate investment as en vogue, or were more driven by financial returns — might back away, she agreed. But it seems unlikely that people who genuinely believe in climate causes will be dissuaded by who’s in the White House. “I think people are waiting to see where the gaps are most effective,” she said.
Wadia, the CEO of the venture capital firm Activate, who spoke with me from the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston, agreed that while the language around giving may change, he is still seeing a “momentum for innovation.”
“If we all just step back, what are we really trying to do?” he said, speaking of nonprofits, philanthropists, and start-ups alike. “Everybody might have a different version of how we do it, but we’re all working towards trying to make the planet a better place for people — for all species on this planet. There’s a general consensus that’s a good thing.”
The nonprofit sector is large and diverse, and the impacts of the political and economic moment will not be felt equally. Local environmental justice nonprofits that relied on federal grants will undoubtedly be worse off than the better-insulated climate financing organizations like Activate, although the turbulence at Breakthrough suggests that even the deepest of pockets can still close to climate causes. (Tellingly, companies funded by Breakthrough’s investment arm, Breakthrough Ventures, do not appear to be affected.) The tension and anxiety aren’t likely to break soon; uncertainty and fear remain pervasive.
If anything can be counted on, though, it’s that climate causes — whether local, national, community-focused, or innovation-related — will need their donors more than ever. The people I spoke with expect them to step up. But is that even a good thing?
“It’s not just the immediate impact — the question mark around grant funding and things like that,” Pierpoint of Trellis Climate told me. “It’s also the question of, is this, in the long term, going to reduce trust in the federal government in a way that lowers investment when folks are trying to leverage dollars?” She paused. “I think it would be bluntly catastrophic for climate development if we get into that world.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Activate is a nonprofit, not a venture capital firm.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. 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: What is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
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.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar 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.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via 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. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.