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The West loves its wide open spaces. Utah, though, is something else.
Every state would like to think itself singular but, truly, there is no place like Utah. The Beehive State has long fascinated outsiders; today, that attention is largely trained on Netflix exposés about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ballerina farmers, and Crumbl cookies, but historically, the obsession has been with its land. Utah has the nation’s highest density of National Parks; its rivers, canyons, mountains, and deserts have stirred Mark Twain, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, and Edward Abbey. To quote a more contemporary literary conduit, Post Malone: “It’s a free country out there. You can buy suppressors in Utah. You can … walk into the grocery store with a handgun on your hip. Cowboy shit.”
More recently, Utah has sought out a different source of outsider attention — that of the United States Supreme Court. Two lawsuits that originated in the state are currently under consideration by the justices. The first, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, concerns the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act with regard to the construction of a railroad spur that would link Utah’s oil fields to the national rail lines. (Though the tracks would be in Utah, the connection would ultimately increase hazardous waxy crude oil shipments through the Colorado county in the case citation.) The second lawsuit, Utah v. the United States — which the court has yet to decide whether or not it will hear — involves the state suing the federal government over its allegedly unconstitutional control of “unused” lands by the Bureau of Land Management. If Utah prevails in the case, it could mean the vast reshaping of the American West, about 47% of which is federal land.
“Utah is all crazy, all the time right now,” Stephen Bloch, the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a conservation nonprofit opposing Utah v. the U.S., told me.
While not immediately apparent, there is nevertheless a strange logic to the two lawsuits that otherwise appear to have little to do with one another beyond the fact of their geography. At their core, both cases are ultimately about who gets to decide to do what with Utah’s land.
To anyone familiar with land use issues in the Mountain West, all of this is fairly routine. A strain of libertarianism and anti-government individualism runs through the more conservative inland Western states, coloring everything from the gun ownership policies so colorfully observed by Post Malone to whom the states back for president. Yet in the extent to which it is willing to pursue this common ideal, Utah is still an outlier.
“Westerners revere their public lands,” Betsy Gaines Quammen, a historian and author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West, told me. “This is what makes the West the West — that you can come out and just go hiking, and you’re not trespassing.” Take the recent Montana Senate race, in which incumbent Democrat Jon Tester wielded his opponent Tim Sheehy’s comparatively mild comments about privatizing public lands as a cudgel in a deep red state. (Tester, it must be added, lost his reelection bid.) But in Utah, instead of celebrating federal land as the embodiment of this Western inheritance, its politicians are trying to eliminate them.
In the case of Utah, this goal is immediate and obvious. State officials claim that the 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” BLM land in the state — that is, public lands not already designated as national parks, monuments, wilderness areas, national forests and conservation areas, or Tribal lands — are held in violation of the U.S. Constitution, which doesn’t explicitly authorize the federal government to hold land indefinitely. “Utah deserves priority when it comes to managing this land,” the state’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox said at a news conference in August, adding, “Utah is in the best position to understand and respond to the unique needs of our environment and communities.”
While Utah’s crown jewel, its “Mighty Five” National Parks, would remain under federal management, the state of Wyoming — which has backed Utah’s lawsuit in an amicus brief along with Idaho, Alaska, and the Arizona legislature — wants even more. “In Wyoming’s filing, they’re like, ‘Oh no, we’re in for everything,” Bloch said. “‘There shouldn’t be any federal land in Wyoming’ — including national parks.” More than 95% of Yellowstone National Park — the nation’s first national park, designated in 1872 — sits within Wyoming’s borders.
It seems doubtful that the Supreme Court will take up this case. For one thing, Utah is attempting to leapfrog the lower courts by taking its complaints directly to SCOTUS, a shortcut it says is justified by its concerns being “of profound importance not just to Utah, but to all the States in the Nation.” For another, President Biden’s Department of Justice has pointed out that what Utah seeks is outside the powers vested in the judicial branch; only Congress has decision-making authority over public lands. On the other hand, “Anyone right now, I think, would hesitate to say definitively, ‘Here’s what the Supreme Court will do,’” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation advocacy group, told me.
Seven County Infrastructure Coalition is a different story. Opponents of the railway claim that the government’s environmental review took into account the remote economic benefits of the railway — including induced employment, a notoriously inexact projection — while not equally weighing the indirect health impacts of the rail line, such as the pollution of additional fracking wells in the Uinta Basin or frontline communities near the refineries on the Gulf, where the crude oil is ultimately headed. The Supreme Court (minus Neil Gorsuch, who recused himself at the 11th hour) heard oral arguments in the case this week, however, and appears on track to rule that the government’s NEPA review for the railroad was sufficient. That would ultimately be a win for the Uinta Basin Railway and the business coalition that brought the suit after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled there were flaws in the upstream and downstream analyses.
“I’m really worried that the court could end up inadvertently blessing this fundamentally arbitrary, imbalanced result, where an agency is allowed to talk about all the indirect benefits that they want — to go as far down the line, as far upstream, to the ends of the Earth chasing these indirect benefits — but not bother talking about the corresponding costs,” Jason Schwartz, the legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law, told me. “That undermines the very purpose of NEPA, which was to present the public and decision-makers with a full and balanced view of both the economic and environmental perspectives.” (Schwartz authored an amicus brief for the Institute of Policy Integrity against the government’s NEPA review.)
A ruling that reaffirms the current scope of NEPA wouldn’t be a shock — the court has always sided with the government in such cases, E&E News notes. What’s different this time is that the plaintiffs presented the court with a third option, an avenue that would severely limit the scope of the NEPA’s environmental review process going forward by restraining agency considerations only to what falls under their immediate purview. Chief Justice John Roberts has sounded skeptical of this pitch so far; it’s this third path, however, that the oil and gas producer Anschutz submitted an amicus brief to the court to support, drawing attention to the fact that “far more is at stake … than the 88-mile rail line in rural Utah.” (The company’s owner, Philip Anchutz, has close ties to Gorsuch.)
“There are so many ways to make NEPA more efficient without arbitrarily decreasing the sometimes crucial information related to indirect effects that NEPA currently provides,” Schwartz told me. Sam Sankar, the senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice, which is supporting the defense, added to me that his read on Seven County Infrastructure Coalition case is that it proves how this Supreme Court has “a pretty aggressive deregulatory, anti-environmental agenda.” The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition told Heatmap in a statement that with regards to the railroad, “we remain committed to advancing this critical infrastructure, which aims to unlock economic opportunities and support the region’s long-term development,” but that it could not comment further as the case remains under deliberation.
A threat to NEPA is also a challenge to who gets a say in what Utah does with its land, of course. Like Utah v. the U.S., the filing for Seven County Infrastructure Coalition bristles with indignation over the government’s determinations about how things should be done or what impacts should be considered, even if the Surface Transportation Board ultimately gave the railroad the green light. Utah, meanwhile, originated as a reaction to the BLM’s Public Lands Rule, in which the agency considers conservation as a land use on equal footing with those of energy development, mining, or grazing. (Specifically, Utah lawmakers were furious about the BLM closing some roads to motorized vehicles. “That’s something that Utah gets very worked up about,” Bloch, the legal director at SUWA, told me.)
There is always a risk of overascribing the state of Utah’s otherwise seemingly inexplicable actions to Mormonism — a religion that is far from monolithic and is often the subject of derision from outsiders. But Quammen, the historian, told me that you can’t separate today’s public land policies from the cultural and theological inheritances and beliefs reinforced over generations of Mormon tradition. “A lot of the people taking these stands [over public lands] come from families that have been in that area for generations, so they have stories and ideologies that have been passed down — as has their relationship with the land,” Quammen explained.
Weiss, of Western Priorities, concurred. “There are some folks in Utah who truly believe that this land belongs to them,” he said.
Quammen noted by way of example that Cliven Bundy, who led a standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 over the demand that the BLM cede its land to the states, told her his legal right to the public lands where he grazes his cattle in Nevada started when his ancestor’s horse drank from its Virgin River — although in fact it was a Southern Paiute river before that. (That’s not the only historically inaccurate ownership claim that might be at play in Utah; Bloch of SUWA noted that the lands within the exterior boundaries of the state were ceded to the federal government in 1848 through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the U.S.-Mexico War, and in that sense, “they’ve never been ‘Utah lands’ so there’s nothing to ‘give back’ to Utah.”)
Preservationists and conservationists during the settlement era saw Utah’s landscape as untrammeled (“also not true, because it was Indigenous land,” Quammen added) and in need of protection, but early church belief viewed it differently. “They thought that the land being utilized, built, and made productive was pleasing to the eye of God,” Quammen said. Finally, Joseph Smith, the founder of LDS, emphasized the importance of his adherents understanding the U.S. Constitution inside and out. In the case of public lands disputes, this resurfaces in the claim that the federal government can’t own land indefinitely, Quammen told me. “That’s the piece about understanding the Constitution better than constitutional scholars.” Ironically, it disregards the state’s constitution, in which Utah explicitly agreed in 1894 to “forever disclaim[s] all right and title to the unappropriated public lands” in order to be granted statehood.
There is, of course, a significant small-government push in the Republican Party, too; privatizing land was part of the party’s presidential platform this year. It can be hard to tell, however, where one influence ends and another begins: William Perry Pendley, a key figure in the Reagan administration during the Sagebrush Rebellion fight over public lands in the 1970s and 1980s, authored the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of the Interior. Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee for the head of the department, recently met with Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, a devout Latter-Day Saint, who afterward posted, “Great meeting with @dougburgum and planning the return of American lands to the American people.” And if Trump attempts to walk back protections of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments again, that land would be added to the pot of what Utah is seeking to acquire.
Utah’s organizers seem prepared to make an appeal to Congress or the Trump administration if the Supreme Court doesn’t make a move in their favor; funding for the messaging for Stand for Our Land, the publicity arm of the lawsuit, has reportedly outpaced the spending on lawyers. (A request for comment to the Utah Attorney General’s Office and Gov. Spencer J. Cox went unanswered.)
The implications of the Supreme Court’s decisions on limiting the scope of NEPA or hearing the public lands lawsuit are vast in both cases. The former could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development in Utah, which would be “a bona fide public health nightmare,” according to Brian Moench, an anesthesiologist on the board of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, which is opposing the railroad, due to all the additional pollution. “If they’re allowed to do this and increase the oil and gas drilling production by 500% — I don't know what you would call the end result. Unlivable, as far as I’m concerned.”
In the case of the public lands, meanwhile, “I think [Utah is] trying to give the impression that these are scrubby lands that nobody cares about when, in fact, it concerns landscapes like Labyrinth Canyon or the Dirty Devil or the Fisher Towers — these very iconic red rock landscapes that Americans think about when they think about visiting the state,” Bloch told me. “Those are the types of places in the crosshairs with this lawsuit.”
Ironically, it’s doubtful that a transfer of public lands would even benefit most Utahns. Because states can’t run deficits, a disaster like a bad wildfire would drain the Utah budget. Additionally, ranchers would pay far more for grazing their cattle on state lands (as high as $19.50 per animal unit per month, per the BLM) than on federal lands, where the fee is a dirt-cheap $1.35. Ultimately, the state likely wouldn’t even possess much of the land it claims to want so badly.
Utah’s politicians “would much prefer to be able to sell off any lands that they want — whether it’s for oil and gas leasing, whether it’s for mansions near national parks. This is very valuable land and a very valuable resource that belongs to all Americans,” Weiss of Western Priorities said. “And Utah would prefer if it belonged to them.”
Public lands and pride in the natural environment are fundamental to many Westerners’ beliefs and identities. By that token, it would seem Utah has made a miscalculation that only an insider could truly appreciate the cost of; by taking over control of portions of its territory from the federal government, it would be, in effect, boxing Utahns out of their own lands —a craven, modern twist if ever there was one.
But to be able to hike or hunt, to pitch a tent, to fish, to stargaze, to graze one’s cattle on nearly 70% of the land in Utah, because it belongs to us, the public?
Now that’s cowboy shit.
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When I reached out to climate tech investors on Tuesday to gauge their reaction to the Senate’s proposed overhaul of the clean energy tax credits, I thought I might get a standard dose of can-do investor optimism. Though the proposal from the Senate Finance committee would cut tax credits for wind and solar, it would preserve them for other sources of clean energy, such as geothermal, nuclear, and batteries — areas of significant focus and investment for many climate-focused venture firms.
But the vibe ended up being fairly divided. While many investors expressed cautious optimism about what this latest text could mean for their particular portfolio companies, others worried that by slashing incentives for solar and wind, the bill’s implications for the energy transition at large would be categorically terrible.
“We have investments in nuclear, we have investments in geothermal, we have investments in carbon capture. All of that stuff is probably going to get a boost from this, because so much money is going to be flowing out of quote, unquote, ‘slightly more established’ zero emissions technologies,” Susan Su, a climate tech investor at Toba Capital, told me. “So we’re diversified. But for me, as a human being, and as somebody that cares about climate change and cares about having an abundant energy future, this is very short-sighted.”
Bigger picture aside, the idea that the Senate proposal could lead to more capital for non-solar, non-wind clean energy technologies was shared by other investors, many of whom responded with tentative hope when I asked for their thoughts on the bill.
“The extension of the nuclear and geothermal tax credits compared to the House bill is really important,” Rachel Slaybaugh, a climate tech investor at DCVC, told me. The venture firm has invested in the nuclear fission company Radiant Nuclear, the fusion company Zap Energy, and the geothermal startup Fervo Energy. As for how Slaybaugh has been feeling since the bill’s passage as well as the general sentiment among DCVC’s portfolio companies, she told me that “it's mostly been the relief of like, thank you for at least supporting clean, firm and bringing transferability back.”
Indeed, the proposed bill not only fully preserves tax credits for most forms of zero-emissions power until 2034, but also keeps tax credit transferability on the books. This financing mechanism is essential for renewable energy developers who cannot fully utilize the tax credits themselves, as it allows them to sell credits to other companies for cash. All of this puts nascent clean, firm technologies on far more stable footing than after the House’s version of the bill was released last month.
Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures echoed these sentiments via email when he told me, “the Senate proposal is a meaningful improvement over the House version for clean energy companies. It creates more predictability and a clearer runway for emerging technologies that are not yet fully commercial.” Breakthrough invests in multiple fusion, geothermal, and long-duration energy storage startups.
Amy Duffuor, co-founder of Azolla Ventures and managing director at the Prime Impact Fund also acknowledged in an email that it’s “encouraging” that the Senate has “seen the way forward on clean firm baseload power.” However, she issued a warning that the unsettled policy environment is leading to “material risks and uncertainties for start-ups reliant on current tax incentives.”
Solar and wind are by far the most widely deployed and cost-competitive forms of renewable energy. So while they now mainly exist outside the remit of venture firms, there are numerous climate-focused startups that operate downstream of this tech. Think about all the software companies working to optimize load forecasting, implement demand response programs, facilitate power purchase agreements, monitor grid assets, and so much more. By proxy, these startups are now threatened by the Senate’s proposal to phase out the investment and production tax credits for solar and wind projects beginning next year, with a full termination after 2027.
“I think solar and wind will survive. But it's going to be like 80% of the deals don't pencil for a long time,” Ryan Guay, co-founder and president of the software startup Euclid Power, told me. Euclid makes data management and workflow tools for renewable project developers, so if the tax credits for solar and wind go kaput, that will mean less business for them. In the meantime though, Guay expects to be especially busy as developers rush to build projects before their tax credit eligibility expires.
As Guay explained to me, it’s not just the rescission of tax credits that he believes will kill such a large percent of solar and wind projects. It’s the combined impact of those cuts, the bill’s foreign entity of concern rules restricting materials from China, and Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made components. “You’re not giving the industry enough time to actually build that robust domestic supply chain, which I agree needs to happen,” Guay told me. “I’m all for the security of the grid, but our supply chains are already very constrained.”
Many investors also expressed frustration and confusion over why Senate Republicans, and the Trump administration at large, would target incentives for solar and wind — the fastest growing domestic energy sources — while touting an agenda of energy dominance and American leadership. Some even used the president’s own language around energy issues to deride the One Big Beautiful Bill’s treatment of solar and wind as well as its repeal of the electric vehicle tax credits.
“The rollbacks of the IRA weaken the U.S. in key areas like energy dominance and the auto industry, which is rapidly becoming synonymous with the EV industry,” Matt Eggers, a managing director at the climate-tech investment firm Prelude Ventures, wrote to me in an email. “This bill will still ultimately cost us economic growth, jobs, and strategic positioning on the world stage.”
“The only real question is, are we going to double down on the future and on American dynamism?” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, asked in an emailed response. “Or are we going to cling to the past by trying to hold back a future of abundant, clean, and affordable energy?”
Su wanted to focus on the bigger picture too. While the Senate’s proposal gives tax credits for solar and wind a much longer phaseout period than the House’s bill — which would have required projects to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and enter service by 2028 — Su still doesn’t think the Senate’s version is much to celebrate.
“The specific changes that came through in the Senate version are really kind of nibbling at the edges and at the end of the day, this is a huge blow for our emissions trajectory,” Su told me. She’s always been a big believer that there’s still a significant amount of cutting edge innovation in the solar and wind sectors, she told me. For example, Toba is an investor in Swift Solar, a startup developing high-efficiency perovskite solar cells. Nixing tax credits that benefit the solar industry will hit these smaller players especially hard, she told me.
With the Senate now working to finalize the bill, investors agreed that the current proposal is certainly not the worst case scenario. But many did say it was worse than they had — perhaps overly optimistically — been holding out for.
“To me, it's really bad because it now has a major Senate stamp of approval,” Su told me. The Senate usually tempers the more extreme, partisan impulses of the House. Thus, the closer a bill gets to clearing the Senate, the closer it usually is to its final form. Now, it seems, the reconciliation bill is suddenly feeling very real for people.
“At least back between May 22 and [Monday], we didn't know what was going to get amended, so there was still this window of hope that things could change more dramatically." Su said. Now that window is slowly closing, and the picture of what incentives will — and won’t — survive is coming into greater focus.
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.
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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.