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The urgency of the green transition hasn’t made tribal concerns any less important.
It’s windy in the Great Plains and it’s sunny in the Southwest. These two basic geographic facts underscore much of the green energy transition in the United States — and put many Native American tribes squarely in the middle of that process.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that “American Indian land comprises approximately 2% of U.S. land but contains an estimated 5% of all renewable energy resources,” with an especially large amount of potential solar power. Over the past few months, a spate of renewable energy projects across the country have found themselves entangled with courts, regulators, and tribal governments over how and under what circumstances they are permitted on — or even near — tribal lands.
In Oklahoma, a federal judge ordered that dozens of wind turbines be removed after ruling that the developers had violated federal law by not seeking mineral rights. In Arizona, two tribes and two nonprofits sued the Bureau of Land Management, objecting to the planned route of a massive transmission project. Tribes objected to designating an area off the Oregon coast for wind farming, and federal energy regulators announced a new policy requiring energy developers to get tribal permission prior to seeking any permits for projects on tribal lands.
“We are establishing a new policy that the Commission will not issue preliminary permits for projects proposing to use Tribal lands if the Tribe on whose lands the project is to be located opposes the permit,” the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said in a filing denying a trio of pumped-storage hydropower projects on Navajo Nation land in Arizona and New Mexico.
“Navajo Nation is in support of solar power, and the Navajo utility has developed some solar sites, which are operating right now,” George Hardeen, public relations director for the Navajo Nation leadership, told me. “But pumped storage, we’re not quite ready for that.” Just like everyone else in Arizona, New Mexico, or neighboring states, the Navajo Nation has a heavily contested relationship with its surrounding water resources. The Navajo Nation recently lost a case in the Supreme Court, where it argued the federal government had an obligation to meet its water needs under 1868 and 1849 treaties.
While the legal issues around tribal governance are distinct, the dilemmas and tradeoffs of energy development — renewable or otherwise — are not. Energy production itself is nothing new for the Navajo Nation. The now-shuttered Navajo Generating Station operated for almost 50 years with a workforce that was almost exclusively Navajo. Along with a neighboring mine, it generated tens of millions of dollars of royalty and other payments for the Navajo Nation and the neighboring Hopi Tribe.
But the competing goals of speedy renewable energy development versus protection of the landscape become heightened on native lands.
“You’ve always had consultation requirements,” Heather Tanana, a visiting professor at the University of California-Irvine, told me. “The big change is the weight of the tribal voice in that process,” describing FERC’s policy as a “shift to actual empowerment of tribal communities who decide what is going to happen.”
FERC’s decision is consistent with a Biden administration-wide effort to empower tribes on a “nation-to-nation” basis. This effort has naturally heavily involved the Department of Interior — led for the first time by a Native American, Pueblo of Laguna member Deb Haaland — which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as a bevy of agencies including the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which play major roles in energy infrastructure.
“Having the agency take this position is consistent is what the administration has said it should do,” Tanana said. “It’s good because it shows something tangible and real, and not just good intentions that haven’t always played out well in the past.”
That’s putting it mildly. The history of energy development and Native Americans is marked by exploitation, whether the subject is the Osage murders of the 1920s, lung cancer among Navajo uranium mine workers, or the construction of dams that obliterated native fishing grounds.
“The Biden administration is very sensitive to tribal concerns,” Warigia Bowman, a law professor at the University of Tulsa, told me. But enforcement of the new requirements will be up to regulators and prosecutors across the country, Bowman said.
That enforcement has been especially harsh in Osage County. Typically, landowners control both the surface and mineral rights of their land, which essentially means they can sell both the land they own and the rights to what’s underneath it. But the mineral rights on the Osage Nation Reservation are exclusively owned by the Osage Tribe and overseen by the elected Osage Minerals Council, which can lease out mineral rights. And, like many in the petroleum business, the Osage Minerals Council has lamented limitations on drilling.
“What’s special about the Osage wind case is the specifics of land ownership for the Osage,” Bowman said. “It’s unusual to have surface and mineral rights separated.”
It’s these mineral rights that have turned into a massive headache for wind developers. The energy developers Enel and Osage Wind leased over 8,000 acres in Osage County for a wind farm starting in 2010. The Osage Minerals Council sued in 2011, saying the project would block its ability to develop any resources underneath the area the developers had leased. Then the federal government sued in 2014 when construction began, arguing that the excavation for the wind turbines’ foundations constituted mining without permission.
Late last year, a federal judge ruled that the developers owed monetary damages and the “ejectment of the wind towers.” The developers estimated that complying with the injunction would cost almost $260 million.
And energy development doesn't have to be on tribal land in order to potentially run afoul of laws and regulations mandating consultation. The Tohono O’odham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe, along with the nonprofit groups the Center for Biological Diversity and Archeological Southwest, sued the Bureau of Land Management seeking an injunction to stop construction of the SunZia transmission line, a decades-in-the-waiting 4,500 megawatt project that seeks to bring wind energy west from New Mexico. The project got approval from BLM last spring. The suit filed in January argued that the developers failed to adequately consult with tribes over “sacred and cultural resources in the San Pedro Valley,” even if the proposed route was on a mixture of federal, state, and private land.
“Under the [National Historic Preservation Act], agencies are required to make a good faith effort to identify Indian tribes for consultation,” Tory Fodder, a law professor at the University of Arizona, explained to me in an email. “The NHPA provides fairly robust consultation mechanisms for tribal cultural and religious sites that are not necessarily confined to the reservation of a tribe.” Since, Fodder said, both the Tohono O’odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache claim “ancestral connections to the area,” they should have been consulted early on.
The BLM and Pattern Energy both claim they were. In a response to the suit, the federal government argued that it had “engaged in lengthy, good faith consultation efforts with the Tribes and other consulting parties regarding the San Pedro Valley,” and that the route had been finalized since 2015, giving the tribes and nonprofits years to intervene.
In an emailed statement, Pattern Energy’s vice president of environmental and permitting, Natalie McCue, said: “Respecting tribal sovereignty and completing the United States’ largest clean energy project is not a binary choice. We deeply respect the Tohono O’odham Nation’s and the San Carlos Apache Tribe’s right to self-governance and to express their views on cultural protection. Given this, we were saddened by the decision to pursue legal action, especially given our commitment to open, good-faith dialogue on these vital issues.” Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for March; in the meantime, construction has been allowed to continue.
On the West Coast, there's growing tribal opposition to the beginning of a process for offshore wind development. The Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians said they were “extremely disappointed” in the Bureau Ocean Energy Management’s decision to designate two areas off the Oregon coast for wind energy development.
While the BOEM said the designation only came after “extensive engagement and feedback from the state, Tribes, local residents, ocean users, federal government partners, and other members of the public,” the Confederated Tribes contend that the areas “are within the Tribe’s ancestral territory, contain viewsheds of significant cultural and historic significance to the Tribe, and are important areas for Tribal fishing,” and that the Tribes only became aware of the designation from the Oregon Governor’s office, not the BOEM directly.
Although the stakes of the zero-carbon transition are new, the issues of sovereignty and exploitation of Native American lands are as old as the United States. “The Tribe will not stand by while a project is developed that causes it more harm than good,” the Tribal Council Chair Brad Kneaper said in a release. “This is simply green colonialism.”
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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images