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Most nonprofit boards can do whatever they want.
Surely you’ve heard by now. On Friday, the board of directors of OpenAI, the world-bestriding startup at the center of the new artificial intelligence boom, fired its chief executive, Sam Altman. He had not been “consistently candid” with the board, the company said, setting in motion a coup — and potential counter-coup — that has transfixed the tech, business, and media industries for the past 72 hours.
OpenAI is — was? — a strange organization. Until last week, it was both the country’s hottest new tech company and an independent nonprofit devoted to ensuring that a hypothetical, hyper-intelligent AI “benefits all of humanity.” The nonprofit board owned and controlled the for-profit startup, but it did not fund it entirely; the startup could and did accept outside investment, such as a $13 billion infusion from Microsoft.
This kind of dual nonprofit/for-profit structure isn’t uncommon in the tech industry. The encrypted messaging app Signal, for instance, is owned by a foundation, as is the company that makes the cheap, programmable microchip Raspberry Pi. The open-source browser Firefox is overseen by the Mozilla Foundation.
But OpenAI’s structure is unusually convoluted, with two nested holding companies and a growing split between who was providing the money (Microsoft) and who ostensibly controlled operations (the nonprofit board). That tension between the nonprofit board and the for-profit company is what ultimately ripped apart OpenAI, because when the people with control (the board) tried to fire Altman, the people with the money (Microsoft) said no. As I write this, Microsoft seems likely to win.
This may all seem remote from what we cover here at Heatmap. Other than the fact that ChatGPT devours electricity, OpenAI doesn’t obviously have anything to do with climate change, electric vehicles, or the energy transition. Sometimes I even have the sense that many climate advocates take a certain delight in high-profile AI setbacks, because they resent competing with it for existential-risk airtime.
Yet OpenAI’s schism is a warning for climate world. Strip back the money, the apocalypticism, the big ideas and Terminator references, and OpenAI is fundamentally a story about nonprofit governance. When a majority of the board decided to knock Altman from his perch, nobody could stop them. They alone decided to torch $80 billion in market value overnight and set their institution on fire. Whether that was the right or wrong choice, it illustrates how nonprofit organizations — especially those that, like OpenAI, are controlled solely by a board of directors — act with an unusual amount of arbitrary authority.
Why does that matter for the climate or environmental movement? Because the climate and energy world is absolutely teeming with nonprofit organizations — and many of them are just as unconstrained, just as willfully wacky, as OpenAI.
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Let’s step back. Nonprofits can generally be governed in two ways. (Apologies to nonprofit lawyers in the audience: I’m about to vastly simplify your specialty.) The first is a chapter- or membership-driven structure, in which a mass membership elects leaders to serve on a board of directors. Many unions, social clubs, and business groups take this form: Every few years, the members elect a new president or board of directors, who lead the organization for the next few years.
The other way is a so-called “board-only” organization. In this structure, the nonprofit’s board of directors leads the organization and does not answer to a membership or chapter. (There is often no membership to answer to.) When a vacancy opens up on the board, its remaining members appoint a replacement, perpetuating itself over time.
OpenAI was just such a board-only organization. Even though Altman was CEO, OpenAI was led officially by its board of directors.
This is a stranger way of running an organization than it may seem. For a small, private foundation, it may work just fine: Such an organization has no staff and probably meets rarely. (Most U.S. nonprofits are just this sort of organization.) But when a board-only nonprofit gets big — when it fulfills a crucial public purpose or employs hundreds or thousands of people — it faces an unusual lack of institutional constraints.
Consider, for instance, what life is like for a decently sized business, a small government agency, and a medium-sized nonprofit. The decently sized business is constantly buffeted by external forcing factors. Its creditors need to be repaid; it is battling for market share and product position. It faces market discipline or at least some kind of profit motive. It has to remain focused, competitive, and at least theoretically efficient.
The government agency, meanwhile, is constrained by public scrutiny and political oversight. Its bureaucrats and public servants are managed by elected officials, who are themselves accountable to the public. When a particularly important agency is not doing its job, voters can demand a change or elect new leadership.
Nonprofits can have some of the same built-in checks and balances — but only when they are controlled by members, and not by a board. If a members association embarrasses itself, for instance, or if it doesn’t carry out its mission, then its membership can vote out the board and elect new directors to replace them. But stakeholders have no such recourse for a board-only nonprofit. Insulated from market pressure and public oversight, board-only nonprofits are free to wander off into wackadoodle land.
The problem is that board-only nonprofits are only becoming more powerful — in fact, many of the nonprofits you know best are probably controlled solely by their board. In 2002, the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol observed that American civic life had undergone a rapid transformation: where it had once been full of membership-driven federations, such as the Lions Club or the League of Women Voters, it was now dominated by issues-focused advocacy groups.
From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, she wrote, America “had a uniquely balanced civic life, in which markets expanded but could not subsume civil society, in which governments at multiple levels deliberately and indirectly encouraged federated voluntary associations.” But from the 1960s to the 1990s, that old network fell apart. It was “bypassed and shoved to the side by a gaggle of professionally dominated advocacy groups and nonprofit institutions rarely attached to memberships worthy of the name,” Skocpol wrote.
The sheer number of groups exploded. In 1958, the Encyclopedia of Associations listed approximately 6,500 associations, Skocpol writes. By 1990, that number had more than tripled to 23,000. Today, the American Society of Association Executives — which is, just so we’re clear here, literally an association for associations — counts almost 1.9 million associations, including 1.2 million nonprofits.
This new network includes some nonprofits that claim to have members but are not in fact governed by them, such as the AARP. It includes “public citizen” or legal-advocacy groups, which watchdog legislation or fight for important precedents in the courts, such as Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, or Public Citizen itself. And it includes independent, mission-driven, and board-controlled nonprofits — such as OpenAI.
There is nothing wrong with these new groups per se. Many of them are inspired by the advocacy and legal organizations that won some of the Civil Rights Movement’s biggest victories. But unlike the member federations and civic associations that they largely replaced, these new groups don’t force Americans to engage with what their neighbors are thinking and feeling. So they “compartmentalize” America, in Skocpol’s words. Instead of articulating the views of a deep, national membership network, these groups essentially speak for a centralized and professionalized leadership corps — invariably located in a major city — who are armed with modern marketing techniques. And instead of fundraising through dues, fees, or tithes, these new groups depend on direct-mail operations, massive ad campaigns, and foundation grants.
This is the organizational superstructure on which much of the modern climate movement rests. When you read a climate news story, someone quoted in it will probably work for such a nonprofit. Many climate and energy policy experts spend at least part of their careers at some kind of nonprofit. Most climate or environmental news outlets — although not this one — are funded in whole or part through donations and foundation grants. And most climate initiatives that earn mainstream attention receive grants from a handful of foundations.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this setup — and, of course, an equivalent network devoted to stopping and delaying climate policy exists to rival it on the right. But the entire design places an enormous amount of faith in the leaders of these nonprofits and foundations, and in the social strata that they occupy. If a nonprofit messes up, then only public attention or press coverage can right the ship. And there is simply not enough of either resource to keep these things on track.
That leads to odd resource allocation decisions, business units that seem to have no purpose (alongside teams that seem perpetually overworked), and decisions that frame otherwise decent policies in politically unpalatable ways. It regularly burns out people involved in climate organizations. And it means that much of the climate movement’s strategy is controlled by foundation officials and nonprofit directors. Like any other group of executives, these people are capable of deluding themselves about what is happening in the world; unlike other types of leaders, however, they face neither an angry electorate nor a ruthless market that will force them to update their worldview. The risk exists, then, that they could blunder into disaster — and take the climate movement with them.
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.