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The Oscar-winner and El Capitan free solo-er talks to Heatmap about solar panels, fatherhood, and his new docuseries, Arctic Ascent.
In 2017, rock climber Alex Honnold went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote Free Solo, the then-new documentary about his unassisted climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan. “Is there anything bigger than that?” Kimmel prompted as a closing question.
“I mean, there are technically some bigger walls in the world,” Honnold said. “But they’re in very remote places — like Greenland.”
Five years and an Oscar later, Honnold was scrambling off a boat at the base of Ingmikortilaq, a crumbly sea cliff that towers nearly 1,000 feet higher than El Cap over an iceberg-ridden fjord in eastern Greenland. His intended first ascent was the culmination of a six-week adventure across ice fields and glaciers.
This time, Honnold wasn’t alone. The Greenland expedition included two other legendary climbers, Hazel Findlay and Mikey Schaefer, as well as Aldo Kane, who provided safety and technical support; Adam Kjeldsen, a Greenlandic guide; and perhaps most surprisingly, Heïdi Sevestre, a Frenchglaciologist who helped set up or run 16 different studies to collect data for scientists around the world.
The team’s adventure is captured in Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold, a three-part docuseries that premieres on Hulu and Disney+ on February 5. Ahead of its release, I spoke separately with Honnold and Sevestre about the expedition, the importance of climate science, and their respective climbs. (While Sevestre, previously a non-climber, didn’t attempt Ingmikortilaq, she did scale a 1,500-foot rock face known as the Pool Wall while drilling rock cores for samples.) Our conversations have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Unlike a lot of other outdoor sports like mountaineering or skiing or even surfing, rock climbing doesn’t seem as obviously imperiled by climate change. How did this become the cause you wanted to devote your time and money to?
Oh, I think climbing is more imperiled by climate change than most other sports. I mean, you’re right that maybe it’s not as impactful as to skiing, but it’s way more impactful than almost every other sport.
You’re still in the mountains. Wildfire smoke every summer — that’s now a thing that just didn’t exist when I was growing up climbing. Even if you’re just rock climbing, you’re always approaching in the mountains. Nowadays, most couloirs [chutes between rocks that might typically fill with snow in the winter] have melted out. Stable snow fields that have existed for generations are now melted out. Piles of teetering rubble are falling down mountainsides, and also a lot of routes are just less safe. The mountainsides themselves are collapsing, like the Aiguille du Midi gondola in Chamonix. Which, actually — one of the things we were installing in Greenland were temperature sensors on one of the cliffs, related to studying how rocks thaw out, what happens when permafrost melts. I would say that climate change is still incredibly relevant for us.
Your way into climate was through your climbing, then?
A big part of my environmental awareness in general is because of the experiences I’ve had outdoors as a climber. But long before [the Greenland expedition], I started a foundation in 2012 where I’ve been supporting community solar projects around the world and caring about the transition to renewables. I’ve cared about climate change forever. I think this was just the first opportunity to do it on mainstream television.
I saw that Arctic Ascent purchased carbon credits to compensate for production emissions. I was hoping you could talk about that decision, and how else you might have minimized your impact on the expedition, since I don’t think people are aware of how energy intensive film and TV productions can be.
In this case, other than the obvious expense of all of our flights getting to Greenland, we had a relatively low carbon footprint because we were camping the whole time. I think you’re right that a lot of television is kind of insane when you have all the RVs and everyone’s in their own thing and there’s hair and makeup and it’s just crazy with, like, a million cameras. In this case, it was basically a bunch of people camping on a glacier for six weeks, so it’s not quite the same as a Hollywood set.
But yeah, I think the idea to purchase offsets was the obvious bare minimum for a project like this. If you’re going to be doing a whole story around sea level rise, you have to do something.
The Honnold Foundation focuses on bringing solar panels to vulnerable communities, but these are fairly small projects compared to the expansive solar farms we might more traditionally think of. Why did you choose to focus your time on something that might seem, at least on paper, to be of a smaller scale than, say, electrifying the grid?
It’s a totally fair question. In 2012, it wasn’t totally clear that the world was transitioning to renewables at all. It seemed like it was inevitable, but you’re never really sure — you know, back then people were into hydrogen and you’re like, “Oh, maybe we’re going to have hydrogen cars, or maybe battery electric really takes off,” blah, blah, blah. Anyway, now it seems totally clear that the world is transitioning to renewables. Within some timeframe, like 20 to 50 years, the world will be 100% renewable.
The thing is, we currently live in a world where something like a billion people don’t have access to power, and transitioning to renewables will still leave us in a world where a billion people don’t have access to power. [Editor’s note: The number of people living without electricity today is actually closer to 760 million.] As the system changes, there are so many people who are left behind. What the Honnold Foundation tries to do is find that sweet spot in helping with the transition, helping the people who are being left behind.
Part of that is just by necessity — I’m a professional rock climber, I’m not a tech billionaire. So the small-scale grants just make more sense to some extent, but they also have the biggest impact on human lives because when you do these small-scale projects, you can fundamentally change the way people live. That’s a huge impact.
I live in Las Vegas, and you see huge solar farms around the desert. It’s great; the grid is going 100% renewable. I’m into that. But realistically, the only difference it makes in most people’s lives is maybe a small change in their utility rate. Really, the people that benefit are the utility shareholders — it’s some Warren Buffett-owned utility in my case, NV Energy. That really isn’t that inspiring. This is my long rant to say that the Honnold Foundation is trying to help the humans who need it the most.
Did you get a chance to use solar panels on the Greenland expedition?
On this trip, no, because they were running a generator for production and it was charging, like, 50 batteries.
It’s funny because we did an expedition in Antarctica where we made a little climbing film as well. And on that trip, they planned to take a generator and then somebody just forgot the fuel. So we got there and we were like, “Oh, no,” and we wound up doing the whole trip off solar and it totally worked.
This was your first expedition since becoming a father. You’ve worked on the climate cause for a long time now, but I’m curious if your perspective has changed at all since your daughter June joined your family — and I know you have another daughter on the way!
Yeah, soon! No, I don’t think my perspective has changed too much. I’ve always cared about these kinds of issues. The bigger change is in the way that I spend my time. Having a family forces me to be a little bit tighter about the choices that I’m making, what expeditions I choose to go on. That makes a trip like this even more worthwhile, where you get to do great climbing and there’s a real purpose behind it, and you get to share important knowledge about things that matter.
Can you tell me a little more about the decision to bring Heïdi on board? I heard her version of the story earlier this week but I’m curious about how you found her and roped her in.
Isn’t she so amazing?
She was delightful!
That’s the thing with Heïdi. Because when you spend time with her, she just makes you care about about ice. And I don’t even like ice. It’s not my thing; I like rocks. But she made me much more knowledgeable and much more caring about that type of world.
Do you consider yourself an optimist when it comes to climate change?
I think so, which is weird because I’m optimistic despite all the data to the contrary. I understand the predictions, but there’s so much to gain. So far it’s been 20 years that I’ve been reading environmental nonfiction and we haven’t really chosen to make anything of this opportunity, but we still have this incredible opportunity to build a better world to live in, a cleaner world. We can still choose that at any point. And I just keep thinking that at some point, we’re going to choose it. You can’t keep ignoring the obvious thing forever.
How did you get involved in the Arctic Ascent expedition?
This was an absolute dream come true for me — I felt extremely lucky to get a call from the team. It is extremely challenging to go to that one remote location, one of the least studied places on Earth. But Alex, as you know, is a firm believer in the scientific work. The planets really aligned. It took about a year prior to the expedition to design the work we could do with boots on the ground.
I wanted to know what it was like to put together scientific objectives for an expedition like this. It’s a little bit unconventional because there’s a film crew and there was climbing involved.
I think it was extremely brave and extremely daring of the entire team to have the willingness to invite the scientists on board. Because not only did we have the best climbers in the world climbing in a very challenging and hostile environment, we’re also filming a series of documentaries and we have to do some of the very best possible science. So it’s not that easy! But what we did is, we took it step by step. We contacted all the universities and labs and institutions interested in data from this part of the world — and also interested in training me on how to collect this data. Because I really felt — it’s what I was thinking the whole time — I really felt like I was an astronaut on the ISS. I was the only one, and I had to do the best possible work.
We ended up with 16 different protocols to do on this expedition, so it was really major. And, you know, we worked with NASA, we worked with research institutes in Denmark, the University of Buffalo, and the University of Kansas, for example. So it was challenging but a dream come true to be trusted by the scientists.
Your first big polar expedition was actually to Greenland, back in 2011. Had you been back to the island between that research trip and this one?
I had spent a tiny bit of time — not so far in the field as East Greenland, but around the coastlines. But what I was doing there was mostly science communication with people who wanted to learn about the impacts of climate change on the Greenland ice sheets. So I hadn’t been on a big research expedition to Greenland since 2011. And the changes were absolutely massive.
That was going to be my question!
The Arctic is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. Everything that’s taking place in Greenland is impacting the rest of the world, so I felt that we had a duty and a mission — on top of climbing these incredible monoliths, we actually had to bring something back to society.
In the series, you talk about how remote and understudied East Greenland is by climate scientists. But during the expedition, you were being assisted by support helicopters and by boats. So why aren’t expeditions like this one happening all the time? Is it an issue of funding or a lack of scientific interest in this particular region?
It’s crazy to think of how little data we have from the ground [in East Greenland]. We have satellites — we have as many satellites as we want. But it is very tricky to get there. What you have to understand about this place is that for 10 months of the year, there is sea ice blocking access to this field. Ten months of the year! So the rest of the year — yes, we can access by plane, we can access by boat, but it’s very expensive.
What was great about this project is that we had in mind, “How can we lower our carbon footprint?” This is why, for example, we worked with fishermen who had boats from a nearby village at the entrance of the field. It was very important for us to use local means of transportation. Of course, we had to use helicopters every now and then, because there was no other way. But it’s remote, it’s expensive, and on top of everything, it is extremely hostile.
Oh my gosh, the bashing you get when you go there! This is something that we really wanted to show in the series — how powerful nature can be. And climate change is accelerating and making these changes even more violent. So I think it’s important to show that when nature starts to be a bit destabilized, it can get very angry.
There was a paper in Nature that came out earlier this month that said nearly every glacier in Greenland has thinned or retreated over the past few decades. In the series, there’s a bit of good news, which is that the Daugaard-Jensen Glacier is a little bit more stable than you were anticipating. Do you have any insight into why that might be?
What’s so great is, it keeps part of the mystery! I like that we still don’t totally understand what’s taking place.
The scientists we’ve been working with have told us — this is a bit technical — but it has to do with the shape of the bedrock. It seems that the glacier is resting on a little ridge that might be holding everything together. This might be the reason why the glacier is still stable; also, this part of Greenland still receives a lot of snow.
But we’ve seen some cracks in this perfect picture. You know, the NASA float [that we launched on the expedition] has told us that the temperature of the water in the fjords is increasing. So it’s not all perfect. The environment around it is definitely changing, but it seems that it has some advantages.
Were there any findings from the expedition that you are particularly excited about?
All of them! But science takes a very long time, so at the moment, we’re still waiting on a lot of the results from these different protocols. But what I want to share is something that is very simple: Greenland holds a lot of ice, and if we lose the ice, it means 6 to 7 meters of sea-level rise. As you saw in the paper that was published by Nature, at the moment, Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice per hour. What is crucial to understand is that every action we conduct back home to reduce our carbon footprints and to preserve our climate helps Greenland and helps our collective future. All this data will help us to prepare for the things to come.
Last question: Have you taken up rock climbing?
I’ll be honest: no. I think I’m a bit traumatized in a good way. I think I needed a minute to recover. But I really want to start climbing again — now, with the launch of this series, I know that it’ll be my mission for this year. Otherwise, I think Alex and Hazel will never forgive me.
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“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”
On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”
The Environment and Public Works Committee largely preserved the cuts made by the House, with one odd exception.
The Senate GOP began working through Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill this week, and at least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House.
Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of the bill on Wednesday evening, and it retains many of the policy repeals and funding rescissions that were in the House version.
To be clear, it does not touch the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, the most controversial climate-related parts of the package. Their fate will be up to the Senate Finance Committee, which is not expected to release text for its section of the bill until at least next week. There has been no indication that Republicans in the upper chamber intend to fight for any of the myriad grant programs the IRA created.
Still, I’m looking closely to see if some of it might yet be saved. For example, there is, oddly, one Environmental Protection Agency grant program targeted by the House bill that is absent from this first text from the Environment and Public Works Committee: $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Here’s what is in the text.
The text published Wednesday would repeal and rescind funding for more than two dozen programs, most of which are administered by the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the General Services Administration. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the now-infamous lending program for clean energy projects targeted by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as a wasteful, fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Biden administration, is still on the out list. Same goes for funding for oil and gas producers to reduce their methane emissions, plus a related fee that would be levied on operators who did not reduce methane leakage below a certain threshold.
The full list of cuts:
The text would also rescind two new pots of money that were not touched by the House bill — funding for Endangered Species Act recovery plans, strategies developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help threatened species thrive again, and general funding for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to train staff, do environmental reviews, and improve stakeholder and community engagement.
Like the House bill, the Senate committee’s text includes instructions to repeal the latest update to the nation’s tailpipe emissions standards for cars. The regulations are required under the Clean Air Act and were strengthened under the Biden administration for model years 2027 through 2032, requiring automakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric vehicles over time.
It would not, however, repeal the latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (also known as the CAFE standards), which regulate how far a vehicle must be able to travel on a gallon of fuel and were targeted by the House bill.
This provision is one I’ll be watching closely, as Democrats are likely to challenge its inclusion. If Republicans want to pass the budget bill with a simple majority, they can only include policies that affect the federal budget, and as the Environmental Defense Fund told me, these standards are “regulations, not budgetary provisions.”
The text proposes the same pay-to-play permitting scheme that was in the House bill and would allow energy infrastructure developers to pay for expedited permitting. Like the House bill, it also asserts that environmental assessments made under this program “shall not be subject to judicial review.”
Coming up, we’ll be on the lookout for a text from the Energy and Natural Resources committee, which will reveal whether Senate Republicans have any interest in saving the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, administered by the Loan Programs Office, which provides essential support for the nuclear industry.