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Economy

EV Earnings on Deck

On the Mona Lisa, EU red tape, and a bold Chicago ordinance

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Current conditions: Warm temperatures in the Pacific Northwest and Central Plains could set daily records • Jet stream to dump “extended” rain on California • It’ll hit nearly 60 degrees today in Kansas City, whose Chiefs are headed to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years to face the San Francisco 49ers.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Earnings calls continue — and with them, EV insights

Earnings season continues this week with 106 S&P 500 companies on deck to report to investors in the next five days. Upcoming calls with automakers in particular could offer additional insight into the purported “slowing” of the electric vehicle market. Here is where things currently stand:

  • General Motors reports Tuesday. In December, the company halted sales of its 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV over issues with software and charging, and it postponed a $4 billion electric truck plant in Michigan last year as well. GM says it sold 19,469 EVs in Q4, down slightly from the quarter before.
  • Ford reports next week. The company has significantly reduced production of its F-150 Lightning.
  • Polestar’s Q4 results won’t be released until the end of February, but the Volvo-owned brand “cut about 15% of its global workforce [last week] in response to what it described as ‘challenging market conditions’ and lower volume expectations in 2025,” The Wall Street Journalreports.
  • Last week, Tesla projected “notably slower” growth for the year ahead. The company “is clearly trying to figure out what to do next,” wroteHeatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.

2. EU climate chief warns against ‘false narrative’ that climate action and business interests are at odds

The European Union’s climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, said that the energy transition will mean a “heavy change” for industries on the continent but warned against the “false narrative” that climate action comes at the cost of business and innovation, The Financial Timesreported Monday. Hoekstra’s comments came ahead of an intended proposal by Brussels that the EU cut emissions by 90% of 1990 levels by 2040.

While the aggressive proposition would need to be agreed upon by EU governments before becoming law, environmental regulations have already rankled farmers in Germany, Poland, Romania, Belgium, and France — where farmers even threatened to put Paris “under siege” on Monday — while right-wing politicians have attacked green policies and industrialists have blamed “red tape” for holding up innovation. “We need to stand on two legs: one leg is climate action, the other leg is the just transition, competitiveness, and a thriving business community, because both are needed,” Hoekstra said.

3. Food sustainability activists chuck soup at the Mona Lisa

On Sunday, a pair of activists threw soup at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre museum in Paris — although Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, which has seen this kind of thing before and resides safely behind fortified glass, was not damaged.

The demonstrators identified themselves as belonging to Riposte Alimentaire, which The Washington Postdescribes as a “food security protest group” under the umbrella of the A22 Network, which also includes the climate groups Just Stop Oil and Last Generation. “Farmers are squeezed by the pressures of mass distribution, going so far as to make them sell at a loss,” Riposte Alimentaire said in French, according to the Post. “Our agricultural and food system also has extremely worrying environmental consequences.”

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  • 4. Chicago faces uphill battle to ban gas from new construction

    Last week, Chicago Mayor Mayor Brandon introduced an ordinance that would ban natural gas for cooking and heating in most new construction. “This is a critical first step for [Chicago] to take towards a planned transition away from fossil fuels,” Leslie Perkins, the chief of staff and policy director for the city’s Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy, toldUtility Drive at the time. However, the ordinance faces an uphill battle, The Chicago Tribune argued in a Sunday editorial. “Better to wait and see what the statewide policy is on the future of natural gas,” the authors wrote, stressing examples like Berkeley, California, which has been unable to enforce its version of a gas ban after a federal appeals court ruled the city doesn’t have the authority. Additionally, “much of the power keeping lights on in Chicagoland comes from nuclear energy (which doesn’t emit carbon) and, ironically enough, gas (which does),” the op-ed authors pointed out. “It’s not economically feasible to build new nuclear plants at present, so any increased electricity demand will be met mostly by burning gas.”

    5. Maui County identifies 100th and final Lahaina wildfire victim

    Over the weekend, Maui police identified the 100th victim of the August 8 Lahaina wildfire as Lydia Coloma, 70. She was also the last unidentified victim and was ID’ed using “the context of the location where the remains were found,” rather than by DNA or other methods, The Associated Pressreports.

    Coloma is one of nine members of her family who died in the wildfire, as well as the first victim to be identified since November 11. Police said three other people still remain unaccounted for, down from more than 1,000 in the immediate aftermath of the fire.

    THE KICKER

    “What lies for the future for the Osage? Energy is the front end of our business. The other part of it is the environmental stewardship of this reservation.” —Everett Waller, chairman of the Osage Minerals Council, who also plays Paul Red Eagle in Killers of the Flower Moon. A federal judge has sided with the Osage Nation against Italian utility Enel, which has been ordered to remove 84 wind turbines from tribal land found in violation of the Osage mineral estate.

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    Q&A

    How the Wind Industry Can Fight Back

    A conversation with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications

    The Q&A subject.
    Heatmap Illustration

    Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”

    Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.

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    Hotspots

    A New York Town Bans Both Renewable Energy And Data Centers

    And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.

    The United States.
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    1. Chautauqua, New York – More rural New York towns are banning renewable energy.

    • Chautauqua, a vacation town in southern New York, has now reportedly issued a one-year moratorium on wind projects – though it’s not entirely obvious whether a wind project is in active development within its boundaries, and town officials have confessed none are being planned as of now.
    • Apparently, per local press, this temporary ban is tied to a broader effort to update the town’s overall land use plan to “manage renewable energy and other emerging high-impact uses” – and will lead to an ordinance that restricts data centers as well as solar and wind projects.
    • I anticipate this strategy where towns update land use plans to target data centers and renewables at the same time will be a lasting trend.

    2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project will learn its fate under the Trump administration by this fall, after a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department must come to a decision on how it’ll handle a court challenge against its permits by September.

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    Spotlight

    The Wind Projects Breaking the Wyoming GOP

    It’s governor versus secretary of state, with the fate of the local clean energy industry hanging in the balance.

    Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    I’m seeing signs that the fight over a hydrogen project in Wyoming is fracturing the state’s Republican political leadership over wind energy, threatening to trigger a war over the future of the sector in a historically friendly state for development.

    At issue is the Pronghorn Clean Energy hydrogen project, proposed in the small town of Glenrock in rural Converse County, which would receive power from one wind farm nearby and another in neighboring Niobrara County. If completed, Pronghorn is expected to produce “green” hydrogen that would be transported to airports for commercial use in jet fuel. It is backed by a consortium of U.S. and international companies including Acconia and Nordex.

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