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Climate

Trump Confirms Wind Ban While Overturning the California Waiver

On Trump’s ‘windmill’ ban, FEMA turnover, and PNW power

Trump Confirms Wind Ban While Overturning the California Waiver
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Physical activity is “discouraged” at the Grand Canyon today as temperatures climb toward 110 degrees Fahrenheit • Tropical Storm Wutip could dump 7 inches of rain in six hours over parts of VietnamInvestigators are looking into whether this week’s triple-digit heat in Ahmedabad, India, was a factor in Thursday’s deadly plane crash.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump confirms his administration is ‘not going to approve windmills’ because they’re eyesores

  Noah Buscher/Unsplash

President Trump said Thursday that his administration is “not going to approve windmills unless something happens that’s an emergency.” The comments — made during the White House East Room signing of legislation overturning California’s authority to set its own car pollution standards — were Trump’s clearest confirmation yet of my colleague Jael Holzman’s reporting, which this week found that “the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass.” As Jael went on in The Fight, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have “simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders — and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.”

Trump justified the pause by adding that “we’re not going to let windmills get built because we’re not going to destroy our country any further than it’s already been destroyed,” repeating his long-held grievance that “you go and look at these beautiful plains and valleys, and they’re loaded up with this garbage that gets worse and worse looking with time.” Trump’s aesthetic objections have already blocked at least three wind projects in New York alone — a move that has impacts beyond future energy generation, Jael further notes. According to the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, the policy has impacted “more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks.” Read Jael’s full report here.

2. FEMA loses its storm response coordinator 2 weeks into hurricane season

Turnover at the Federal Emergency Management Agency continued this week after the head of the National Response Coordination Center — responsible for overseeing the federal response to major storms — submitted his resignation, CBS News reported Thursday. Jeremy Greenberg, who’s worked various roles at FEMA for nearly a decade, will stay on for another two weeks but ultimately depart less than a month into hurricane season. “He’s irreplaceable,” one current FEMA official told CBS News, adding that “the brain drain continues and the public will pay for it.” Greenberg’s resignation follows comments President Trump made to the press earlier this week about the need to “wean off of FEMA” after hurricane season is over in November. “A governor should be able to handle” disaster response, the president told reporters on Tuesday, “and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”

3. White House blocks Columbia River energy agreement with Pacific Northwest tribes

Also on Thursday, President Trump issued a presidential memorandum revoking a $1 billion Biden-era agreement to restore salmon and invest in tribally sponsored clean energy infrastructure in the Columbia River Basin, The Seattle Times reports. Biden’s agreement had “placed concerns about climate change above the nation’s interests in reliable energy sources,” the White House claimed.

The 2023 agreement resulted from three decades of opposition to the dams on the Lower Snake River by local tribes and environmental groups. While the Biden administration hadn’t committed to a dam removal, it did present a potential pathway to do so, since Washington State politicians have said that hydropower would need to be replaced by another power source before they’d consider a dam removal plan. The government’s billion-dollar investment would have aided in the construction of up to 3 gigawatts of alternative renewable energy in the region. Kurt Miller, the CEO of the Northwest Public Power Association, celebrated Trump’s action, saying, “In an era of skyrocketing electricity demand, these dams are essential to maintaining grid reliability and keeping energy bills affordable.” But Washington Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, vowed to fight the “grievously wrong” decision, arguing, “Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about the Northwest and our way of life — so of course, he is abruptly and unilaterally upending a historic agreement.”

4. The Bolt is back

Two years after we wrote the eulogy for the Chevrolet Bolt EV — “the cheap little EV we need” — General Motors has announced that it will launch the second generation of the car for the 2027 model year. Though “no other details were provided about this next iteration of the Bolt,” Car and Driver wrote that “we expect it to continue as a tall subcompact hatchback, although it could be positioned as a subcompact SUV like the previous generation's EUV model.” A reveal could be coming in the next several months ahead of a likely on-sale date in mid-2026.

5. Scale Microgrids passes $1 billion in financing

Energy developer Scale Microgrids announced Thursday that its latest round of financing, which closed at $275 million, has brought its total to date to over $1 billion. KeyBanc Capital Markets, Cadence Bank, and New York Green Bank led the round, with Greg Berman, the managing director in KeyBanc Capital Markets Utilities, saying in a statement, “We value our relationship with Scale and congratulate their team as they execute on their strategy to deliver high-quality distributed energy assets to the market.” Scale Microgrids said the financing will “support 140 megawatts of distributed generation projects, including microgrids, community-scale solar and storage, and battery storage installations,” many of which are already under construction in the Northeast and California.

THE KICKER

“Our best chance is to get a group of critical mass of Republican senators to go to [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune and [Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike] Crapo and say, You’ve got to change this. We can’t vote for it the way it is.” —Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in conversation with Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer about the Senate math and strategy behind saving the Inflation Reduction Act.

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Climate

AM Briefing: House Cues Up Thursday Passage of GOP Megabill

On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits

House Cues Up Potential Thursday Passage of GOP Megabill
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the CarolinasFrench far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in EuropeGreat fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.

THE TOP FIVE

1. House cues up early morning passage of Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.

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Sparks

Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

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Politics

Trump Promised Deregulation. His New Law Would Regulate Energy to Death.

The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.

Power lines and Trump's tie.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.

The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.

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