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Last summer was the hottest in two millennia. We won’t get any relief this year.
An overwhelming majority of Americans will experience above-average heat this summer, and temperatures in more than half of the contiguous United States are expected to top the historical average by at least 2 degrees Fahrenheit, according to AccuWeather. New York is expected to endure twice as many 90-plus-degree days as last year; Boston could experience up to four times as many.
Americans got a taste of what’s to come this week, with a blistering heat wave that began in the Southwest and has scorched the East Coast for the past three days. That heat may have come early based on the historical averages, but considering more recent trends, it’s right on track.
“The biggest changes that we have seen in recent decades is that the heat wave season has been expanding, starting earlier in the late spring and ending later into early fall, on average,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson told Heatmap.
The northern Rockies, Great Lakes, and the Northeast are areas of particular concern, Paul Pastelok, AccuWeather’s Lead Long-Range Forecaster, told Heatmap. Those regions will likely experience less precipitation and more intense heat this summer compared to their historical average. “The Northern Plains and Upper Midwest are tricky,” Pastelok said. “Right now, this area is getting rain, but this could cut off by the very end of June into July, and turn around to dryness with the heat following.”
While temperatures will most likely peak in the interior Southwest — Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico — by early July, the region can expect temperatures between 112 and 118 degrees until then. Monsoon season, which brings warm winds and rainfall inland, will likely arrive in late July instead of the usual late June, Pastelok said. Peak heat could come much later — anytime between July and September — for those in the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and the Northeast.
The biggest “warm anomalies” are expected in the Southwest and central Rockies, the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley and the Northeast, according Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. “We are looking at anomalies for the entire summer of +4 degrees (F) which is pretty significant over a 3 month period,” Kines wrote in an email to Heatmap.
Heat won’t be the only extreme weather this season. Drought could be severe, particularly in the Southwest — including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where rainfall could come in below 50% of the historical average. That dry spell could intensify over the northern Plains, Great Lakes, and the Northeast later in the summer. The Gulf Coast, meanwhile, can anticipate a staggering 22 to 36 inches of rain this season — compared to its usual 15 to 24 inches — which will likely make flooding an issue.
After a wetter winter, meteorologists anticipated a slow start to the wildfire season in California and the Southwest. In fact, the number of wildfires this year is expected to come in below average: AccuWeather meteorologists predict 35,000 to 50,000 wildfires this year, compared to a historical average of about 69,000. Yet the fires in California also seem to have picked up speed a little earlier than normal. Last week saw more than two dozen fires in the state, perhaps heralding increased fire activity to come.
So how will we deal with all this? Northern cities, especially, tend to be less equipped to deal with extreme summer heat. In Boston, temperatures reached a record-breaking 98 degrees on Wednesday, a day after Mayor Michelle Wu declared a heat emergency. The city opened cooling centers this week in an attempt to minimize the number of heat-related medical emergencies.
Boston Green New Deal Director Oliver Sellers-Garcia told Heatmap that the city is bringing more government agencies into the heat management effort. The Fire and Parks departments plan to set up misting stations, and the city will continue to provide extra pop-up cooling centers in coordination with Boston’s Centers for Youth and Families. Those strategies, Sellers-Garcia said, “can have an instant benefit for someone, whether it’s just a super hot day and they have to get to work or it’s a declared heat wave.”
In Florida, people are used to chronic heat, Miami-Dade County’s Chief Heat Officer Jane Gilbert told Heatmap. Last year the county had 42 heat advisories (which happens when the thermometer reaches 105) and 70 warnings (110), Gilbert said, and this season is already proving more intense: May was the warmest ever on record in the state. To protect residents, the county has established a comprehensive public awareness campaign that targets those most affected by the heat, including outdoor workers, children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with chronic illnesses. It also runs more than 30 cooling centers.
According to Gilbert, the goal is to educate people about the extent of heat impacts so they can make better choices — drink more water, find shade, limit physical activity — and protect their health. “We haven’t fully appreciated, historically as a community, how it impacts our lives,” she said.
Here’s what’s happened so far ...
June 24: On Juneteenth, over 82 million Americans were under active National Weather Service extreme heat alerts — but, due to the national holiday, many publicly operated cooling centers were closed. While Boston had opened 14 new facilities in partnership with the Centers for Youth and Families, for instance, none of them stayed open Wednesday.
The same thing happened in New York, where more than 200 cooling centers were closed for the holiday, most of them libraries. While other heat preparedness measures were still in place — Gov. Kathy Hochul announced free admission for state parks — residents counting on a facility near home had to change plans last minute. On Sunday, New York turned 45 public schools into cooling centers, this time because the public libraries were closed due to budget cuts.
In Chicago, only one cooling center was open during the holiday. The lack of cooling spaces available sparked action from homelessness advocates, who are urging the city to offer more cooling centers that are open 24/7 and also to make those facilities available when the heat index is above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because cooling centers are often multi-purpose spaces, data on their usage is limited. In Boston, 245 people visited cooling centers from June 18 to 20, the mayor’s office told me. New York City’s Department of Emergency Management could only say that six people visited four of the schools open Sunday.
June 21: Communities from Kansas to Maine experienced record-breaking temperatures, with heat indices above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places. Cities including Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Burlington, Vermont opened cooling centers, and Boston and New York activated heat emergency plans. Schools in Buffalo, New York moved to half-day schedules for the week in response to temperature advisories.
The heat wave was expected to hold into the weekend, increasing the risk of emergencies. But ensuring that at-risk residents are aware of public services and heat mitigation strategies is often more difficult than simply providing amenities like cooling centers and air conditioners, Benjamin Zaitchik, a professor of climate dynamics at Johns Hopkins University, told Heatmap. “Preventing heat deaths — in principle, at least — is easy,” Zaitchik said. “It just requires good planning, good communication, good networks.”
The same heatwave afflicted much of the Southwestern United States the week before. Temperatures in Phoenix and Las Vegas exceeded 110 degrees, breaking records and prompting cities to issue heat advisories covering tens of millions of people. At a Trump rally in Las Vegas, 24 people received treatment for heat-related complications and six were hospitalized, The Guardian reported.
June 14-19: More than 1,000 people died during the sacred Muslim pilgrimage known as the hajj as extreme heat gripped Saudi Arabia in mid-June. In Mecca, where temperatures exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, worshippers gripped umbrellas and water bottles to combat the heat. A study from 2019 predicted that hajj conditions would exceed an “extreme danger heat threshold” more frequently in the coming decades, especially when the pilgrimage — which is scheduled according to the lunar calendar — coincides with the warmer months of the year.
The death toll was about five times higher than last year, according to CNN.
June 10: Passengers on a Qatar Airways flight passed out from heat as their plane sat on the tarmac at Athens International Airport. Flight 204, which was delayed for three hours with passengers stuck inside, experienced a malfunction in its air conditioning. Two days later, authorities shut down the Acropolis for five hours due to the 102 degree weather, which marked Greece’s earliest heat wave on record. Many schools were also closed for the day, and several air-conditioned spaces were opened to the public. Greece’s Health Ministry advised older people and those with chronic illnesses to stay indoors.
The intense weather continued throughout the weekend, and at least five tourists were reported to have died due to extreme heat.
Other parts of Southern Europe, such as Cyprus and Turk, have also suffered through heat waves this year. During the second week of June, temperatures in Cyprus exceeded 104 degrees every day and classes ended early. On June 14, some areas experienced their hottest June day ever, reaching 113 degrees. That same week, Turkey also battled record temperatures — they were 8 to 12 degrees higher than the average for the season.
May and June: Both Mexico and India faced extreme temperatures during national elections.
Record-breaking heat waves have scorched Mexico since late March, causing blackouts, wildfires, heat strokes, and animal deaths. On May 25, Mexico City set a new heat record, with the temperature there surpassing 94.4 degrees, while other cities in the country registered even higher temperatures — well above 115 degrees. As of June 12, at least 125 deaths had been attributed to the heat, which has been made worse by an intense drought linked to El Niño. With reservoirs at less than 27% capacity, millions could run out of water by the end of this month.
World Weather Attribution, a research group that analyzes the degree to which climate change is causing extreme weather events, estimated that global warming has made extreme temperatures in the region 35 times more likely. “These trends will continue with future warming and events like the one observed in 2024 will be very common” in a world where average temperatures are 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, the group stated in a release.
Despite sweltering conditions, about 100 million voters elected Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, on June 2. In her victory speech, Sheinbaum, a climate scientist with a focus on energy engineering, said she will work to maintain the country’s energy sovereignty. While Sheinbaum has vouched to expand the country’s renewable energy, she has also been criticized for her support of Pemex, the state-owned oil company.
Two days later, on June 4, India re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a third term during the country’s longest-ever heatwave. By the time the weeks-long voting process wrapped, extreme heat had killed more than 100 people. In Uttar Pradesh, at least 33 poll workers died in a single day, CNN reported. In response, local governments have imposed measures to prevent water waste and protect construction workers. Yet, according to analysis by the Centre for Policy Research found in 2023, most of India’s heatwave policies are underfunded and fail to target the country’s most vulnerable groups.
More extreme weather hammered Mexico beginning June 20 as tropical storm Alberto brought torrential rain and flooding to the country’s east. AccuWeather meteorologists said the storm is just the start of a predicted intense hurricane season in the area. Most of India is still under heatwave alerts, but the weather is set to improve in the next few days as the monsoon finally advances after a week-long delay.
May: Scarce rainfall and soaring heat have led to drought conditions that are threatening China’s food production and water supply. The provinces of Shandong and Henan — crucial to the country’s wheat production — are some of the most affected, and the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters has dispatched two disaster relief guidance teams. New technology, such as multi-functional seeders, and multiple reservoirs have been deployed to ameliorate conditions.
Also on Wednesday, the China Meteorological Administration reported that several regional weather stations recorded the highest temperatures ever in mid-June. Conditions are expected to worsen, as some Chinese provinces are expected to reach 111 degrees this week.
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The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.
The federal government is poised to put solar and wind projects through strict new reviews that may delay projects across the country, according to a widely circulating document reviewed by Heatmap.
The secretarial order authored by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Gregory Wischer is dated July 15 and states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Burgum’s office and Interior’s Office of the Deputy Secretary.
This new layer of review would span essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction on a project can commence — a milestone crucial for being able to qualify for federal renewable energy tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists more than 68 different activities newly subject to higher-level review, including some basic determinations as to whether projects conform with federal environmental and conservation laws, as well as consultations on compliance with wildlife protection laws such as the Endangered Species Act. The final item in the list sweeps “any other similar or related decisions, actions, consultations, or undertakings” under the order’s purview, in case there was any grey area there.
In other words, this order is so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage. In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.
“This is the way you stall and kill projects. Intentionally red-tape projects to death,” former Biden White House clean energy adviser Avi Zevin wrote on Bluesky in a post with a screenshot of the order.
The department has yet to release the document and it’s unclear whether or when it will be made public. The order’s existence was first reported by Politico; in a statement to that news outlet, the department did not deny the document’s existence but attacked leakers. “Let’s be clear: leaking internal documents to the media is cowardly, dishonest, and a blatant violation of professional standards,” the statement said.
Interior’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heatmap about when this document may be made public. We also asked whether this would also apply to transmission connected to solar and wind. You had better believe I’ll be following up with the department to find out, and we’ll update this story if we hear back from them.
Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted — Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.