Senate Natural Resources Committee Proposes Land Sales, ‘Energy Dominance Financing’

Current conditions: Eight to 12 inches of rain could fall in Texas and the southern Plains • Air quality alerts are in place today for the New York metro region due to wildfire smoke from Canada • Parts of Europe will see temperatures up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal on Thursday and Friday, with highs approaching 100 degrees in Florence, Italy.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The Senate Natural Resources Committee releases its reconciliation markup

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee released its take on the Republican reconciliation bill on Wednesday afternoon, with boasts of “repealing billions in unspent Green New Deal handouts.” Its proposals include:

• Requiring the Bureau of Land Management to hold quarterly oil and gas lease sales in nine Western states for the next decade.
• Rescinding unspent funding given to the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office by the Inflation Reduction Act, though it also proposes adding $660 million back into the office’s budget through 2028 as part of a new “Energy Dominance Financing” program, which aims to “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace energy infrastructure that has ceased operations” or “enable operating energy infrastructure.”
• Decreasing royalties for oil and gas operations on public lands and waters and increasing fees that renewable energy projects on public lands have to pay.

The draft also includes the details of Republican Senator Mike Lee’s latest proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands to finance President Trump’s tax cuts. Specifically, the proposal would require the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service to make the “prudent sale” of 0.5% to 0.75% of their lands in 11 western states for “housing, increased timber sales, geothermal leasing, and compensation of states and localities for the cost of wind and solar projects on federal land.” The states named for the selloffs include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, with Montana — home of Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, who opposed a similar proposal in the House — notably absent from the list.

You can read a section-by-section breakdown of the rest of the ENR’s proposals here.

2. EPA files rule to weaken power plant emission regulations

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to retract Biden-era regulations on fossil fuel-fired power plant emissions on the grounds that the plants don’t cause or contribute “significantly” to air pollution. EPA’s proposed rule specifically suggests that power plant pollution makes up merely a “small and decreasing part of global emissions,” and therefore does not require regulation under the Clean Air Act.

But as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reports, electricity usage produces 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year, and accounted for 5% of the total climate pollution worldwide over the past 30 years — making U.S. power plants the world’s sixth biggest CO2 emitter if they were their own country. The administration’s claim that power plants make up only a small portion of global emissions and thus aren’t worth addressing is akin to “a five-alarm fire that could be put out if you send out all the trucks, and you don’t send any of the trucks because no one truck could put the fire out by itself,” David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Emily. “We just think that is a wacky reversal and a wacky interpretation of the Clean Air Act.”

3. NOAA shuts down Climate.gov

Late last month, the Trump administration fired the entire staff of Climate.gov, the main website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, The Guardian reports. The website had a staff of “about 10,” but it also received editorial content from NOAA scientists in other departments. Climate.gov described its mission as “climate communication, education, and engagement,” but it also took pains to be “politically neutral, and faithful to the current state of the sciences,” The Guardian writes. “It’s targeted, I think it’s clear,” said Tom Di Liberto, a former NOAA spokesperson who was fired earlier this year. “They only fired a handful of people, and it just so happened to be the entire content team for Climate.gov. I mean, that’s a clear signal.”

4. World Bank lifts ban on funding nuclear energy projects

The World Bank announced Wednesday that it will end its longtime ban on financing nuclear energy projects. “We will support efforts to extend the life of existing reactors in countries that already have them, and help support grid upgrades and related infrastructure,” World Bank President Ajay Banga wrote in an email to staff, per the Financial Times. Though the development bank’s ban has only been formally in place since 2013, it hasn’t funded a nuclear project since 1959. “In the decades since, a few of the bank’s major funders, particularly Germany, have opposed its involvement in nuclear energy,” The New York Times notes, although both Germany and the Trump administration have recently pivoted toward more pro-nuclear positions. In his memo, Banga added that the bank’s ban on funding oil and gas projects, which has been in place since 2017, will also be reconsidered.

5. Talen Energy, Amazon reach nuclear deal to support regional data center

Amazon on Wednesday announced a deal to buy enough power from Pennsylvania nuclear plant operator Talen Energy “to sustain a midsize city for years,” Barron’s reports. The agreement will see Talen supplying Amazon with electricity “for operations that support AI and other cloud technologies at Amazon’s data center campus,” while maintaining its “ability to deliver to other sites throughout Pennsylvania,” Talen said in its own announcement, with the companies also agreeing to explore building a new small modular reactor in the state.

The news comes against the backdrop of Congress’ efforts to eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, even as tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google continue to pursue ambitious net-zero energy goals. “There’s little doubt the tech companies would prefer an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy,” my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in her recent analysis. “Exactly how much they’re willing to fight for it is the real question.” Amazon’s deal with Talen for nearly 2 gigawatts of nuclear power through 2042 follows Meta signing a nuclear agreement with Constellation Energy last week and Microsoft partnering with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island last year.

THE KICKER

  Tesla

“Tentatively, June 22.” —Elon Musk, responding on Twitter to a question about the public launch date of the self-driving Tesla Cybercab robotaxi in Austin, although he added, “We’re being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the level of rescissions from LPO’s budget.