Climate
AM Briefing: The ‘Low-Hanging Fruit’ of Emissions
On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
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On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Not even the companies that — on the surface, at least — seem most likely to benefit from them.
On EU EVs, Exxon’s CCS projects, and Australia’s election
For a while First Solar looked like a “Liberation Day” winner. Now its first quarter results suggest otherwise.
The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released a budget proposal that attempts to claw back nearly $9 billion in grants.
On campaigns, clean energy manufacturing, and the IEA
Current conditions: Lisbon and “most of Spain” are without power due to a massive blackout • Dubai residents are being told to limit outdoor activity today as temperatures could hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit • Monday will be “one of the most active days of severe weather so far this season” in the U.S., with meteorologists issuing a rare “high risk” warning for intense storms and destructive tornadoes across the Upper Midwest.
It’s Election Day in Canada, where Liberal Party leader Mark Carney holds a modest lead against the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre — a “stunning reversal” from late last year, when Conservatives had a 20-point lead in the national polls. But that was before President Trump’s tariffs and comments about annexing the country.
The election has been a stunning reversal in other ways, as well: In 2021, “the environment topped the list of voter concerns,” the BBC notes, and “there was a consensus between the two major parties that Canada should rapidly transition to a green economy.” But climate change has not been a central talking point of the 2025 campaigns, even for Carney, a former special envoy on climate action and finance to the United Nations.
Instead, Carney cut the country’s carbon tax on his first day as prime minister following Justin Trudeau’s resignation, and he has vowed to make Canada a “leading energy superpower” by expanding oil and gas production along with renewable energy and carbon capture and storage technology. Poilievre, a proponent of significantly expanding the nation’s oil and gas industries, has argued that “technology, not taxes, is the best way to fight climate change and protect our environment.” The winner is expected to be announced Monday night or early Tuesday morning.
Clean energy manufacturing fell in the first quarter of 2025, marking “the first decline since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed in 2022,” Barron’s writes based on a new report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rhodium Group. While clean manufacturing has more than tripled, from $2.5 billion at the end of 2022 to $14 billion in the first quarter of 2025, the surge has been driven primarily by the electric vehicle supply chain. In the first three months of the year, six manufacturing projects worth $6.9 billion in investment were canceled, representing “the highest value of cancellations on record,” while $2.1 billion in earlier-stage investments were also canceled. “Among the companies that changed their plans were T1 Energy, formerly known as Freyr Battery; Kore Power; and the electric-vehicle start-ups Nikola and Canoo,” Barron’s notes, with the report crediting some of the turbulence to the fact that the sector “faces rising headwinds from tariff escalations, an uncertain federal policy outlook, and macroeconomic pressures.”
The Trump administration is pressuring the International Energy Agency to “cease its work promoting the global shift to clean power and net-zero carbon emissions,” Politico reports. During the organization’s conference in London last week, attendees largely championed “an exciting vision of energy security and abundance from cheap, homegrown low-carbon power,” in the words of the UK’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. The U.S. acting assistant secretary of energy for international affairs, Tommy Joyce, took a different view, however, bashing net-zero policies that, he said, “harm human lives.”
Republicans have been calling for years for the U.S. to “come up with a strategy to replace leadership at the IEA,” and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice President JD Vance have pushed similar “energy dominance” narratives in their own recent international meetings. But despite what a European official described to Politico as the U.S.’s evident intention to “weaken or disable the IEA unless they’re working on our values,” a French official told reporters that “decarbonization is both an objective and a tool” of energy security and “we have no fear that the IEA will change its position.”
Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD doubled its net profit since last year, from 4.6 billion yuan to 9.2 billion yuan (about $1.3 billion), the company reported in its first-quarter earnings on Friday. The automaker also announced that its revenue increased 36% year-over-year, with total sales of EVs and hybrids rising 60% to over a million units. The earnings stand in stark contrast to Tesla’s Q1 results, which saw profits fall 71% over the first three months of the year. BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s top EV seller in 2024, and The Wall Street Journal notes that it “appears relatively insulated from the U.S. tariffs on the auto sector, having long prioritized other international markets.” You can learn more about how BYD became “the most important car company most Americans have still never heard of” by listening to this episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.
More than 200 people gathered in South Memphis on Friday night to voice their concerns about the use of gas turbines to power the supercomputer facility of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports. “We deserve clean air, and our lungs are not for sale to xAI or Elon Musk,” Democratic state Representative Justin J. Pearson said at the event.
Earlier this month, the Southern Environmental Law Center announced that it had obtained aerial images showing that the Memphis xAI facility was using at least 35 portable methane gas turbines without air permits to power its supercomputer — despite Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s claims that “only 15” were turned on while the permitting was pending. KeShaun Pearson, the president of Memphis Community Against Pollution, slammed xAI over “perpetuating environmental racism” with the illegal generators, since methane emissions have been linked to serious health problems like asthma and certain cancers. The public comment period for the plant’s operations permit for 15 gas turbines closes on April 30.
Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images
The three-year-old activist group Just Stop Oil held its final protest in London this weekend, claiming it has achieved its goal of halting the United Kingdom’s extraction of oil and gas following the Labour Party’s suspension of new exploration licenses in the North Sea in March.
The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”