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In aligning with fossil fuel companies, the administration is deepening skepticism of carbon removal.
For as long as people have been talking about building machines that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the concept has sparked fierce debate. Would such a tool be used the way that scientists envision — alongside aggressive emission cuts? Or would it be co-opted to prolong dependence on fossil fuels?
Suddenly these questions have become less theoretical. Last month, Carbon Engineering, one of the first companies to actually build a “direct air capture” machine, was acquired by Occidental Petroleum, a fossil fuel company that plans to use the technology to market “net-zero oil.” The Biden administration has also selected Occidental as a potential recipient of one of two major grants, worth up to $600 million each, to build a “DAC hub” in South Texas near Corpus Christi. As part of the same announcement, the Department of Energy gave funding to oil and gas companies in California, Alaska, and Alabama for the early planning stages of additional hubs.
“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a press release for the DAC hub awards. "We also need to remove the CO2 that we’ve already put in the atmosphere,”
She’s right. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says pursuing carbon removal is “unavoidable” if the world hopes to limit warming to safer temperatures — but it will only work if we stop burning so much oil and gas. In handing the reins of this new industry to fossil fuel companies, the administration has confused the message, stoking the mistrust of those already skeptical of the technology, and giving carbon removal projects with no fossil fuel connections a steeper hill to climb to earn support.
It hasn’t helped that Occidental’s CEO, Vicki Hollub, has described DAC as a “license to continue to operate.” Shortly after the Biden administration’s announcement, she told NPR that thanks to this technology, “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever.” When I reached out to Occidental for clarification, a spokesperson denied that the company will use the technology to pump more oil than it otherwise would. He pointed me to another statement from Hollub in 2022 where she said producing net-zero oil was about “just meeting demand,” and that as long as there was demand for oil, it was better to meet it with a lower-carbon product.
But the aforementioned events have invited fierce blowback. On Wednesday, 17 climate and environmental justice organizations sent a letter to Secretary Granholm calling on the DOE to revoke its funding offers to fossil fuel companies. “There may be paths forward for equitable, climate-positive DAC, but they do not look like the one we’re on now,” they wrote.
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Climate advocates and community groups are not just concerned about giving fossil fuel companies a license to keep producing. Their objection is tied to where these projects are being deployed. The DAC hubs are almost all being planned in economically distressed areas that have hosted fossil fuel production for decades. The bipartisan infrastructure law, which funded the hubs, requires that at least two meet those characteristics.
This makes some economic and political sense. If you need to build pipelines to transport CO2 or drill into the ground to store it, this is where the knowhow resides. The requirement is also intended as a way to create new jobs and transition workers in places that might otherwise be devastated by the decline of the oil and gas industry. But since fossil fuel companies have a track record of polluting these areas with cancerous chemicals and fighting regulations, locals worry about the risks of putting new technology into their hands.
These fears are not unfounded. There are different types of direct air capture technology, but many require energy or heat to separate and compress the CO2 after it is collected, which could create additional pollution depending on how it is generated. The compressed carbon may then have to be transported, via pipeline, to its final destination. While CO2 pipelines have a good safety record, a highly publicized accident in Mississippi that hospitalized 45 people has fanned fears of ruptures.
Perhaps the biggest worry is around what happens next. Some companies, including Occidental, inject CO2 into depleted oil fields in an effort to squeeze the last drops out. But DOE-funded hubs will not be permitted to do this. Instead, the compressed CO2 will likely be injected into a saline aquifer, a layer of permeable rock thousands of feet underground, which is capped by an impermeable layer that prevents the CO2 from leaking out.
Some geological storage wells have been storing carbon successfully for decades, but there are only a handful of such sites operating around the world. A recent report to Congress detailing U.S. experience with CO2 injection summarized several potential risks to human health associated with it, including drinking water contamination, leaks, effects on soil health, and earthquakes. However, it also noted that CO2 injection wells have more stringent construction, testing, and monitoring regulations than other types.
In Kern County, California, where three DAC hubs have been proposed, all of this invokes deja vu. Juan Flores, an organizer for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, one of the signatories to Wednesday’s letter, told me it reminds people of fracking, which brought increased risk of respiratory problems, cancer, preterm birth, and psychological stress to the area. “They experimented with our communities, they denied the new dangers for many years,” he said. “Now our community members are saying, ‘this again?’”
The DOE hubs program required companies to submit a plan for providing community benefits when they applied for funding. But in Kern County, oil and gas companies have squandered their goodwill, Dan Ress, a staff attorney at the Center told me. For example, the California Resources Corporation, an oil and gas company that won an $11 million DOE grant to do an engineering study for a hub in Kern County, recently supported a multi-million dollar campaign to repeal hard-won regulations banning oil drilling next to homes and schools. “This is the same company saying, oh yeah, we want to be good neighbors and do great community benefits? Absolutely not, get out of here,” said Ress.
The feeling of being the unwitting subjects of an experiment also came up in my conversation with Roishetta Ozane, a community organizer in Lake Charles, Louisiana. That’s where another DAC hub called Project Cypress, which could receive up to $600 million from the DOE, is under development. “We don't want to be guinea pigs for something that's never been tried and tested before on this scale,” Ozane told me.
Ozane is the director of the Vessel Project, a grassroots group supporting the needs of black, indigenous, people of color, and low income people in an industrial city where petrochemical production has dramatically expanded over the past decade. (The group was not a signatory on the letter.) She said Lakes Charles is overburdened with pollution and still recovering from a spate of destructive hurricanes in 2020. “We're saying, hey, you might be right. These DAC hubs might work. But why are you testing it in our community?”
There are no fossil fuel companies involved in Project Cypress. But that does not give Ozane any peace of mind. She worries it would “open the floodgates” for companies to keep releasing toxic emissions into the area, as long as they pay someone to pull carbon out of the air afterward.
Multiple people I spoke with in Louisiana and Texas also brought up a history of local officials giving heavy industry a free pass on pollution and major tax breaks. Why should they believe that the DAC hubs will be any better regulated or bring in much-needed revenue?
But local attitudes along the Gulf Coast are varied and complex. Prior to the hubs announcement, Data for Progress, a polling and research non-profit that spearheaded Wednesday’s letter, held a series of focus groups about DAC in Louisiana and Texas. One key finding, Celina Scott-Buechler, a senior fellow who led the research, told me, was that there was a tension between concerns like Ozane’s, and an awareness that fossil fuel companies historically have been the primary sources of good jobs in these communities.
“I think people make a calculated risk decision,” one focus group participant in Lake Charles said. “They're like, oh, so I could be around these chemicals that could have a long-term effect. I may not see them for the next 20, 30 years, but if it's going to take care of my family and give my family a nice home and a good vehicle to drive, then I'll work tirelessly to provide that for my family. But I may die at 65.”
Another stressed that there was a “big need for jobs” and that “sometimes people's need for employment overshadows whether it's good for the environment or not.”
Patrick Nye, who lives in the Corpus Christi area near where Occidental is building its South Texas hub, embodies this tension. Nye owns an energy company that produces oil and generates wind power, but he also runs an environmental group that’s fighting the local expansion of liquified natural gas export facilities and proposed seawater desalination projects. When I asked about his oil business, he said he didn’t have the heart to let his employees go and puts his profits toward his activism.
Nye is skeptical that direct air capture will work, but he thinks it’s worth trying. “If this works, this may help save the planet,” he said. He also sees a lot of potential opportunities flowing to the local university and its graduates. And he thinks the hub will be far enough away from where people live that if things go wrong, few will be impacted. Occidental is building its hub in a largely undeveloped area about 45 miles south of Corpus Christi on King Ranch, the largest private ranch in the country.
At the same time, he’s worried local officials will just rubber stamp the project without proper study. “King Ranch is really well known, they're very politically positioned,” he said. “They have a lot of clout to get this thing done, and it has to be looked at with a very fine tooth comb.”
In addition to requesting DOE withdraw grants for fossil fuel companies, the letter sent Wednesday makes a pitch for how the agency can roll out the DAC hubs program more equitably. The authors propose that projects in areas with extractive industries be co-created or co-owned by communities, actively work to reduce local pollution, have rigorous data transparency, and that locals should have the right to refuse them. They also want community benefits plans to be legally binding, with consequences if companies fail to comply.
All these requirements might sound unfair to companies who are just trying to tackle climate change and make a better world, Scott-Buechler acknowledged. “The question that I ask is, a better world for whom?”
I asked her what it would look like in practice for a community to co-own a DAC hub, considering these are first-of-a-kind projects that are incredibly expensive and financially risky. Would communities be taking on those risks?
This was something that Data for Progress and other groups were still studying, she said, looking at possibilities like having the project held in public trust, or replicating the solar cooperative model. She recognizes that not all communities will be interested in ownership, but thinks it should be an option.
When I asked the DOE how it defends the choice to support fossil fuel company-led projects, a spokesperson told me the agency is “leveraging these companies' significant expertise in managing large energy infrastructure projects and applying this experience to developing DAC projects that are cost-effective, efficient, equitable, and environmentally responsible.”
She also emphasized that Occidental and Project Cypress have only been selected for “award negotiation” and not “officially” awarded yet. “If projects are awarded, DOE and the awardee will have frequent, meaningful engagement with the impacted local community and impacted workers throughout the lifecycle of the project,” she said.
Meanwhile, the agency has also launched a public process to develop a set of safety, environmental stewardship, accountability, and community engagement guidelines for all carbon management projects that it will encourage project developers to (voluntarily) abide by.
But the Biden administration seems eager to support Occidental in its pursuit of direct air capture and encourage more oil and gas companies to follow its lead. During a carbon capture conference last year, Secretary Granholm applauded Oxy’s CEO Vicki Hollub for investing in carbon removal, saying this reflects “exactly the kind of bold thinking we need more of.” Earlier this year, she told a room of oil and gas executives, “We need the energy sector stepping up … few are better positioned to crack open cost-effective carbon management.”
The debate over whether direct air capture is a moral hazard is likely to rage on long after these projects are up and running. But the money is going out the door now. “This is something that is not just coming anymore, it's here,” said Scott Buechler. “Is there a collective vision for what might be able to come next?”
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On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
And how ordinary Americans will pay the price.
No one seems to know exactly how many employees have been laid off from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or, for that matter, what offices those employees worked at, what jobs they held, or what regions of the country will be impacted by their absence. We do know that it was a lot of people; about 10% of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at the agency have left since Donald Trump took office, either because they were among the 800 or so probationary employees to be fired late last month or because they resigned.
“I don’t have the specifics as to which offices, or how many people from specific geographic areas, but I will reiterate that every one of the six [NOAA] line offices and 11 of the staff offices — think of the General Counsel’s Office or the Legislative Affairs Office — all 11 of those staff offices have suffered terminations,” Rick Spinrad, who served as the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told reporters in a late February press call. (At least a few of the NOAA employees who were laid off have since been brought back.)
Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in recent comments about the NOAA layoffs, “This is going to have profound negative consequences on the day-to-day lives of Americans.” He added, “This is something that [Elon Musk’s government efficiency team] just doesn’t even understand. They simply have no idea what they are doing and how it’s hurting people.”
There is the direct harm to hard-working employees who have lost their jobs, of course. But there is also a more existential problem: Part of what is driving the layoffs is a belief by those in power that the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” according to the Project 2025 playbook. As one recently fired NOAA employee put it, “the goal is destruction,” and climate science is one of the explicit targets.
NOAA is a multifaceted organization, and monitoring climate change is far from its only responsibility. The agency researches, protects, and restores America’s fisheries, including through an enforcement arm that combats poaching; it explores the deep ocean and governs seabed mining; and its Commissioned Officer Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, alongside the Army, Marines Corps, and Coast Guard. But many of its well-known responsibilities almost inevitably touch climate change, from the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts and warnings to drought tools for farmers to heat forecasts from the National Weather Service issued on hot summer days. Cutting climate science out of NOAA would have immediate — and in some cases, deadly — impacts on regular Americans.
And it’s likely this is only the beginning of the purge. Project 2025 calls for the complete disbanding of NOAA. Current agency employees have reportedly been told to brace for “a 50% reduction in staff” as part of Elon Musk’s government efficiency campaign. Another 1,000 terminations are expected this week, bringing the total loss at NOAA to around 20% of its staff.
Here are just a few of the ways those layoffs are already impacting climate science.
NOAA collects more than 20 terabytes of environmental data from Earth and space daily, and through its paleoclimatology arm, it has reconstructed climate data going back 100 million years. Not even Project 2025 calls for the U.S. to halt its weather measurements entirely; in fact, Congress requires the collection of a lot of standard climate data.
But the NOAA layoffs are hampering those data collection efforts, introducing gaps and inconsistencies. For example, staffing shortages have resulted in the National Weather Service suspending weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska — and elsewhere — “indefinitely.” The Trump administration is also considering shuttering a number of government offices, including several of NOAA’s weather monitoring stations. Repairs of monitors and sensors could also be delayed by staff cuts and funding shortfalls — or not done at all.
Flawed and incomplete data results in degraded and imprecise forecasts. In an era of extreme weather, the difference of a few miles or degrees can be a matter of life or death.
In the case of climate science specifically, which looks at changes over much longer timescales than meteorology, “I think you could do science with the data we have now, if we can preserve it,” Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at Cornell University who uses NOAA data in his research, told me.
But therein lies the next problem: the threat that the government could take NOAA climate data down entirely.
Though data collection is in many cases mandated by Congress, Congress does not require that the public have access to that data. Though NOAA’s climate page is still live, the Environmental Protection Agency has already removed from its website the Keeling Curve tracker, the daily global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurement that Drilled notes is “one of the longest-running data projects in climate science.” Many other government websites that reference climate change have also gone dark. Solutions are complicated — “downloading” NOAA to preserve it, for example, would cost an estimated $500,000 in storage per month for an institution to host it.
“At the end of the day, if you’re a municipality or a community and you realize that some of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, you’ll want to adapt to it, whether you think it’s because of climate change or not,” Lehner said. “People want to have the best available science to adapt, and I think that applies to Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of communities across the country.” But if the Trump administration deletes NOAA websites, or the existing measurements it’s putting out are of poor quality, “it’s not going to be the best possible science to adapt moving forward,” Lehner added.
I wouldn’t want to be a NOAA scientist with the word “climate” attached to my title or work. The Trump administration has shown itself to be ruthless in eliminating references to words or concepts it opposes, including flagging pictures of the Enola Gay WWII airplane for removal from the Defense Department’s website in an effort to cut all references to the LGBT community from the agency.
“Climate science” is another Trump administration boogey-word, but the NOAA scientists who remain employed by the agency after the layoffs will still have to deal with the realities of a world warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. “Ultimately, what we’re dealing with are changes in our environment that impact ecosystems and humans, and whether you think these changes are driven by humans or not, it’s something that can now be seen in data,” Lehner told me. “From that perspective, I find it hard to believe that this is not something that people [in the government] are interested in researching.”
Government scientists who want to track things like drought or the rapid intensification of hurricanes going forward will likely have to do so without using the word “climate.” Lehner, for example, recalled submitting a proposal to work with the Bureau of Reclamation on the climate change effects on the Colorado River during the first Trump administration and being advised to replace words like “climate change” with more politically neutral language. His team did, and the project ultimately got funded, though Lehner couldn’t say if that was only because of the semantics. It seems likely, though, that Trump 2.0 will be even stricter in CTRL + F’ing “climate” at NOAA and elsewhere.
Climate research will continue in some form at NOAA, if only because that’s the reality of working with data of a warming planet. But scientists who don’t lose their jobs in the layoffs will likely find themselves wasting time on careful doublespeak so as not to attract unwanted attention.
Another major concern with the NOAA layoffs is the loss of expert knowledge. Many NOAA offices were already lean and understaffed, and only one or two employees likely knew how to perform certain tasks or use certain programs. If those experts subsequently lose their jobs, decades of NOAA know-how will be lost entirely.
As one example, late last year, NOAA updated its system to process grants, causing delays as its staff learned how to use the new program. Given the new round of layoffs, the odds are that some of the employees who may have finally figured out how to navigate the new procedure may have been let go. The problem gets even worse when it comes to specialized knowledge.
“Some of the expertise in processing [NOAA’s] data has been abruptly lost,” Lehner told me. “The people who are still there are scrambling to pick up and learn how to process that data so that it can then be used again.”
The worst outcome of the NOAA layoffs, though, is the extensive damage it does to the institution’s future. Some of the brightest, most enthusiastic Americans at NOAA — the probationary employees with under a year of work — are already gone. What’s more, there aren’t likely to be many new openings at the agency for the next generation of talent coming up in high school and college right now.
“We have an atmospheric science program [at Cornell University] where students have secured NOAA internships for this summer and were hoping to have productive careers, for example, at the National Weather Service, and so forth,” Lehner said. “Now, all of this is in question.”
That is hugely detrimental to NOAA’s ability to preserve the institutional knowledge of outgoing or retiring employees, or to build and advance a workforce of the future. It’s impossible to measure how many people ultimately leave the field or decide to pursue a different career because of the changes at NOAA — damage that will not be easily reversed under a new administration. “It’s going to take years for NOAA to recover the trust of the next generation of brilliant environmental scientists and policymakers,” Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, said.
Climate change is a global problem, and NOAA has historically worked with partner agencies around the world to better understand the impacts of the warming planet. Now, however, the Trump administration has ordered NOAA employees to stop their international work, and employees who held roles that involved collaboration with partners abroad could potentially become targets of Musk’s layoffs. Firing those employees would also mean severing their relationships with scientists in international offices — offices that very well could have been in positions to help protect U.S. citizens with their research and data.
As the U.S. continues to isolate itself and the NOAA layoffs continue, there will be cascading consequences for climate science, which is inherently a collaborative field. “When the United States doesn’t lead [on climate science], two things happen,” Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator of NOAA for research, recently told the press. “Other nations relax their own spending in these areas, and the world’s level of understanding starts to decline,” and “countries who we may not have as collegial an understanding with,” such as China, could ostensibly step in and “replace the United States and its leadership.”
That leaves NOAA increasingly alone, and Americans of all political stripes will suffer as a result. “The strategy to erase data and research, to pull the rug from under activism — it’s time-tested,” Lehner, the Cornell climate scientist, said. “But that’s where it’s very infuriating because NOAA’s data is bipartisanly useful.”
Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap senior reporter Jael Holzman.
Donald Trump’s second term has now entered its second month. His administration is doing much to slow down renewables, and everything it can to slow down offshore wind. Jael Holzman is a senior reporter at Heatmap and the author of our newsletter, “The Fight,” about local battles over renewable permitting around the country.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Jael about the bleak outlook for offshore wind, the use of presidential authority to impede energy development, and why solar has been spared — so far. 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, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It seems like there’s a mix here of, you know, some projects are now facing active legal trouble because they still had major permits to secure and the Trump administration is now denying those permits. But some projects, as you were saying, seemed safe, but now they’re not. They’re worried about getting these kind of iterative findings from the government that you need to conduct any major work in federal waters.
How much of the chill that we’re seeing is about active permitting denials, versus how much of it is developers being like, we don’t want to risk getting a permit denied, or asking for something that would be very normal to get a normal approval in the course of normal business operations, getting it rejected and then just being stuck. And so we’d rather just pause, not ask for anything for four years, and then come back and start asking again?
Jael Holzman: Offshore wind industry executives won’t say this on the record, but they have anonymously told me, in many words, that they view what is happening to them in the federal permitting system as not only a barometer check for where the energy transition is, but even broader, it is a risk, it is a challenge, it is a threat to integrity.
With respect to our federal permitting processes, generally what we’re seeing here is, I’ve had some folks in conservative energy circles compare it to the Keystone XL-ification of the energy sector, where the political party that doesn’t like a particular technology weaponizes the permitting system against one particular sector. Now, obviously, it’s politically advantageous for conservatives to describe it this way, but I actually find it to be very useful because what it means is as the politics becomes more fraught for the party in power around a technology, there’s increasingly a willingness to step beyond the realm of what the permitting system is legally supposed to do. And that’s a danger if it’s weaponized against an entire sector.
You know, Keystone pipeline, that was one project. It was exemplary — there was a lot of fervor around that one project — that is not an entire sector having the thumb put on its scale by political officials to derail it, especially one that had been a decade-plus in the works and is required for the energy grids to remain stable in various parts of our country. You know, what we’re seeing here is federal officials not even being willing to schedule meetings for permitting processes that are legally required under the law.
For example, my reporting indicated that at least one project that was prioritized under a permitting reform law to have at least an idea public and put out there for when they would expect to get all their permits — this was the Blue Point Wind offshore wind proposal off the coast of New England and New Jersey, New York. And what we’re seeing here is essentially the obscuring of even what permitting reform ostensibly was supposed to do, right?
There was this conversation in D.C. before Trump took office that maybe if you couple statutory reforms that streamline the processes that currently exist, and you put some sort of timetable into the statute, and you combine that with some gimmes to the oil and gas people, right, at least you could grease the skids enough to have everyone benefit. But my reporting on what’s happened to offshore wind has truly revealed that in many respects, “all of the above” is really a Lucy-with-the-football moment for many proponents of an energy transition.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.