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Plus more venture capital musings on Day 4 of New York Climate Week.
A letter from Day 2 of New York Climate Week.
A dispatch from Day 1 of New York Climate Week.
Greenhouse gas pollution could drop by half a percent this year, according to a new analysis.
One of the largest companies in the world says its products pose catastrophic peril. Sound familiar?
The federal government collects gobsmacking amounts of energy information. A new website makes it easy to access and use.
Under new rules, the United States will impose virtually no limits on greenhouse gas pollution from power plants.
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.
Happy Monday. It’s going to be a big week. Let’s begin with the immediate news.
This afternoon, the Environmental Protection Agency formally rolled back limits on greenhouse gas pollution from existing power plants — and proposed scrapping the rest. If the proposal is finalized, then coal and natural gas power plant operators could soon release as much heat-trapping pollution as they want into the atmosphere. And thanks to other recent rollbacks, power plants can release more mercury, microscopic soot, and other hazardous air pollutants, too.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin made the announcement at a Group of 20 energy minister meeting in Houston.
On a legal basis, the agency is formalizing the change in two steps: First, it partially repealed some rules for power plant emissions; second, it filed a separate legal argument that the Clean Air Act “does not authorize the EPA to regulate emissions from power plants” to fight climate change. Both documents will likely go into effect later this year. Those documents were released as I wrote this newsletter, and we’re still digging through them at Heatmap.
But there are two broader ways, I think, to see this news.
The first is that it confirms America’s abdication of environmental leadership under the Trump administration. Global climate politics is now in a quite different situation than it was in, say, 2018, when the Trump administration last made similar deregulatory moves. China now operates the world’s largest carbon emissions trading system — and while that system targets an odd “intensity” measurement, and gives away many free allowances, it is expanding to other sectors of the economy and the country plans to adopt more conventional targets next year.
Which isn’t to say it’s perfect. I could find something important to criticize about China, Canada, and the European Union’s various carbon schemes. But they have policies at the national or supranational level, and the United States does not. While we still have a handful of state regional policies — such as the-cap and-trade market for Northeastern states — they have been transformed by the politics of inflation.
And things could still get worse. Earlier this year, the Trump administration repealed the EPA’s scientific finding that heat-trapping greenhouse gases can endanger the environment. If it successfully defends that move in court, then any future government will face extra hurdles when seeking to limit carbon pollution. And if the Trump administration secures the Supreme Court ruling it is obviously angling for — and gets the high court to overturn its landmark 2007 decision that said the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases in the first place — then a future Democratic administration might find itself virtually without tools to limit carbon emissions.
The second way of seeing this news, though, is that little has actually changed on the ground — and the biggest unanswered question in American climate policy remains unanswered. Since the Obama administration, the federal government has regulated carbon pollution from cars and trucks (though Trump has of course sought to put an end to those rules, too). But it has never found a way to limit power plant carbon emissions in a comprehensive way.
Instead, successive Democratic presidents, Trump administrations, and the Supreme Court have played a slow-motion, 12-year-long game of regulatory ping pong. In 2014, President Obama proposed a scheme to cut carbon emissions from power plants. Since then, the first Trump administration repealed those rules, the Supreme Court stayed them (and then eventually nixed them), and President Biden proposed a new and more narrow version of them — which the Trump administration has just repealed. And Trump wants to end the game forever by preventing the Clean Air Act from ever regulating carbon emissions.
Trump and his officials are acting irresponsibly by doing so — to say the least. But the truth is that Democratic presidents have never found an enduring way to regulate power plant carbon emissions that the Supreme Court has blessed. And doing so has only gotten harder as the court has marched right over the past decade.
We will keep diving into these new documents here at Heatmap. But we have already covered this story in depth over the past 18 months, too. Check out:
There is one more thing to look forward to this week, by the way. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve will decide whether to raise interest rates. Investors now expect it to bump the federal funds rate by one-quarter of a percentage point, which will affect the investment climate for every part of the energy system — including renewables.
As my colleague Matt Zeitlin has written, interest rates dictate the economics of clean energy because most spending on renewables and other zero-carbon power plants happens at the front end, as capital expenditure. Spending on fossil fuel projects, on the other hand, is more spread out, because operators must purchase fuel over time.
One big question that the Fed will eventually need to confront: Is there any way to rein in above-trend inflation without reducing artificial intelligence spending?
We’ll be covering that story and more as the week develops. Thanks as always for reading.
A new study suggests skeptical voters don’t respond to such urgent language — while climate-concerned voters find it depressing.
We have a fascinating new project to share with you today. It gets to the heart of the question: Is there anything that can make Americans care about climate change right now?
Starting last year, Heatmap commissioned Embold Research to study what U.S. voters currently think about climate change — what messages are connecting with Americans today and which ones are falling flat.
It’s out now. I wasn’t directly involved in this research — other members of our team led it — but I think the results are interesting, useful, and worth your attention. (Embold Research is a frequent research partner of ours, too: They conduct our data center polling.)
The report divvied the electorate into three buckets — registered voters who are already persuaded about climate change, those who are persuadable, and skeptics who are less likely to be convinced — and examines what they believe about politics, energy, and the environment.
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In the study’s first phase, for instance, we asked more than 3,200 Americans to rank 11 different issues in their relative importance. Just over 50% of Americans think climate change is “very” or “extremely important” — and while that may sound encouraging, it actually means that climate change ranked last among the 11 issues we tested.
“The environment” ranks much higher among the three cohorts, with 70% of Americans considering it at least “very” important. The economy, jobs, inflation, and the cost of living dominate voter concerns.
What’s interesting, though, is that these questions of issue importance reverse among the group of “persuaded” Americans. This group believes climate change to be among the most dire problems facing the United States. They’re concerned about the economy too, to be clear — but they also rank healthcare costs, the environment, and threats to democracy more highly than other groups. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, this group identifies overwhelmingly as Democrats.)
My colleague Jeva Lange has more on another finding from the research: why voters don’t believe politicians when they say clean energy is the cheapest form of energy available. You should read her story — but before we go, I want to highlight one more finding from the study.
In the study’s second phase, Embold Research called back 15 of the respondents from the first poll and held in-depth interviews with them about their beliefs on climate, politics, and what messages they responded well to (and which ones turned them off). Then it surveyed a new sample of more than 2,100 Americans, using lessons from the interviews to inform their questions.
One lesson from those phases: Calling climate change a “crisis” or “catastrophe” fell flat among voters — but for different reasons among each cohort.
For voters who are already persuaded about climate change’s dangers, the framing is demotivating. Those people are already worried about climate change, and so hearing that more informed advocates are worried about a climate “crisis” or “catastrophe” just makes them more numb and depressed.
Skeptics, meanwhile, think the language is meant to manipulate them. And for voters who could be persuaded about climate change, talk of a “crisis” conflicts with their observation of gradual change and punctuated equilibrium.
That message sits at odds with how Democratic politicians and issue advocates talked about climate change in the first few years of this decade, obviously. And it points to another interesting finding: Even when American voters are skeptical of climate change as an issue area, they still generally care about the environment.
This new report is the first in a series of Heatmap reports on how American voters view climate, clean energy, and sustainability issues. If you'd like to receive our latest updates, downloadable reports, and invitations for special briefings, please fill out this form.
