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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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Republicans are more likely to accuse Democrats, and vice versa, but there are also some surprising areas of agreement.
Electricity is getting more expensive. In the past 12 months, electricity prices have increased more than twice as fast as overall inflation — and the most recent government inflation data, released last week, shows prices are continuing to rise.
The Trump administration knows that power bills are a political liability. In a recent interview with Politico, Energy Secretary Chris Wright affirmed that power prices were rising, but blamed the surge on “momentum” from Biden and Obama-era policies. “That momentum is pushing prices up right now,” he said. But the Trump administration, he continued, is “going to get blamed because we’re in office.”
Is he right? Who do Americans blame for rising power prices?
It might not be who you think.
A new Heatmap Pro poll of more than 3,700 registered voters across the United States finds that Americans tend to look beyond national politics for at least some of the causes of electricity price inflation.
When asked who they blame for rising power prices, Americans are more likely to say that rising energy demand, their local utility, and their state government are to blame than they are to cite the Trump or Biden administrations.
Americans also blame extreme weather and the oil and gas industry at least somewhat for electricity inflation. Only then do they blame a national political party.
Beyond those, other trendy national topics made only a dent in how Americans think about rising power prices. About 28% of Americans said that the construction of new data centers bears “a lot” of the blame for spiking power prices. Forty-three percent of Americans said that the data center buildout should get “a little” of the blame, and about a quarter of Americans said data centers were “not at all” responsible.
The renewable energy industry, which President Trump has claimed is causing the surge, also failed to get much traction among Americans. More than a third of respondents said that renewables were “not at all” responsible for rising electricity prices, while 27% said that they bore “a lot” of responsibility. At the same time, Americans aren’t pinning the increase on tariffs: 40% of registered voters said that in their view, the new trade levies were not the cause of higher bills.
In general, Americans aren’t wrong to look to their state government when thinking about their power bills. Although many states participate in regional electricity markets, electricity is primarily regulated at the state level by public utility commissioners. States really do bear more responsibility for power prices than they do over, say, the price of a loaf of bread — or a gallon of gasoline.
No matter their self-reported political affiliation, Americans still tend to blame their state government, rising demand, and their local utility for rising power bills.
But there are trends. Democrats, of course, are far more likely to blame the Trump administration and Republicans — as well as tariffs — for electricity inflation. Republicans likewise blame the Biden administration and Democrats in much greater numbers.
Nearly 80% of Republicans say the renewable energy industry bears some amount of blame for rising prices, although only 36% of GOP respondents said it bore “a lot” of responsibility. But more than half of Republicans also allocated “a lot” or “a little” blame to the oil and gas industry.
Some causes seemed to unite respondents across the parties. Roughly the same share of Democrats, Republicans, and independents said that the buildout of new data centers was putting upward pressure on power prices.
Independent voters turned to the same big three explanations as other registered voters. But they were much more likely to blame Trump, tariffs, and the oil industry than Republicans were. Only a little more than a quarter of independents said that the renewable energy industry bore “a lot” of the blame for power price spikes as well.
In my reporting, I’ve found that surging investment in the local distribution grid — literally, the small-scale poles, wires, and transformers that get electricity to businesses and households — is the biggest driver of rising power prices. Extreme weather, higher natural gas prices, and — in some markets — rising power demand, especially from data centers, also play a role.
Some experts blame those drivers of higher bills on underlying failures — such as too little oversight from state-level regulators or excessive investment from utilities — that show up in this poll result. But just at a mechanical level, many Americans did cite some of the same causes that utility researchers themselves do. Most Americans, for instance, said that extreme weather and especially “investments in the local electric grid” are driving rising bills, although they didn’t assign it the same prominence that I would. About three quarters of respondents said that those causes bore “a lot” or “a little” of the blame.
Of course, just because rising grid spending, extreme weather, and higher gas prices have driven electricity inflation so far doesn’t mean that they will continue to do so. The Energy Information Administration projects that demand will keep rising, especially if the artificial intelligence boom continues. The Trump administration’s decision to hike taxes on electricity equipment — via tariffs and recent changes in President Trump’s spending bill — may eventually push up costs as well. So too will the Trump administration’s regulatory war on some types of new electricity infrastructure, including offshore wind farms and long-distance transmission lines.
Those policies may eventually hit voters — and their wallets. But right now, Americans aren’t looking at Washington, D.C., when thinking about their power bills.
The Heatmap Pro poll of 3,741 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from August 22 to 29, 2025. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.
Interested in more exclusive polling and insights? Explore Heatmap Pro here.
Current conditions: A prolonged heatwave in Mississippi is breaking nearly century-old temperature records and driving the thermometer up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit again this week • A surge of tropical moisture is steaming the West Coast, with temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than average • Heavy rainfall has set off landslide warnings in every major country in West Africa.
The Trump administration asked a federal judge on Friday to withdraw the Department of the Interior’s approval of a wind farm off the coast of Maryland, Reuters reported. Known as the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, the $6 billion array of as many as 114 turbines in a stretch of federal ocean was set to begin construction next year. Developer US Wind — a joint venture between the investment firm Apollo Global Management and a subsidiary of the Italian industrial giant Toto Holding SpA — had already faced pushback from Republicans. The town of Ocean City sued to overturn the project’s permits at the federal and state levels. When the Interior Department first announced it was reconsidering the permits in August, Mary Beth Carozza, the Republican state senator representing the area, welcomed the move but warned in a statement the news site Maryland Matters cited that opponents’ campaign against the project, known as Stop Offshore Wind, “won’t stop fighting until the Maryland offshore wind project is completely dead.”
It’s all part of President Donald Trump’s widening “war against wind” energy that kicked off the moment he returned to the White House and issued an order halting approvals for new offshore and onshore turbines. If you read the timeline Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo neatly charted out earlier this month, you’ll notice how quickly the administration’s multi-agency crackdown on wind power expanded, particularly after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4. The industry is just starting to push back. As I reported in this newsletter two weeks ago, the owners of the Rhode Island offshore project Revolution Wind that Trump halted unilaterally filed a lawsuit claiming the administration illegally withdrew its already-finalized permits. US Wind said it intends “to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.”
EPA chief Lee Zeldin stands next to Vice President JD Vance. Megan Varner/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed killing the long-standing program requiring thousands of facilities across the country to report the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gas they release into the atmosphere every year. Since 2010, the government has collected the data on emissions from coal-fired plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and other industrial sites, which now represents what The New York Times called “the country’s most comprehensive way to track greenhouse gases.”
The decision could have grave consequences for carbon capture and storage. Some had hoped Trump’s vision of unleashing fossil fuels might spur more investment in the technology to capture emissions before they enter the atmosphere and recycle the gas for industrial use or store it in wells underground. But the mix of hardware, pipelines, and storage sites remains so underdeveloped that the EPA in June said it’s “extremely unlikely that the infrastructure necessary for CCS can be deployed” by the 2032 deadline a previous Biden-era rule had set for equipping fossil fuel plants with carbon capture technology, E&E News reported at the time. Eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program hampers all the federal programs that rely on its data. That includes the carbon capture subsidy, known by its tax code section head 45Q, which Republicans recently dialed up in Trump’s reconciliation law. The rules for claiming the tax credit include filing technical details to the EPA’s emissions program. When Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reached out to the EPA to ask whether gutting the database posed a setback for companies looking to claim the credits, an agency spokesperson pointed him to a line in Friday’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
In a flurry of deals on Sunday night, at least a half-dozen U.S. nuclear companies unveiled plans for new facilities in the United Kingdom as Washington looks to fill order books for its fuel makers and next-generation reactor companies and London looks to ramp up its atomic energy output. Among the deals:
The announcements add to what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called the “nuclear power dealmaking boom.” In a recent paper, policy experts at the center left think tank Third Way concluded that “the U.S. and U.K. are well-suited for further collaboration on nuclear, specifically SMR and Gen IV technologies,” and “could reduce deployment costs through learning rates and commissioning larger order books.”
Nearly a decade of bureaucratic tinkering at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission came to an end so abruptly it’s most succinctly captured in onomatopoeia: “Womp,” Harvard Law School’s electricity law program director Ari Peskoe wrote on X. “With one paragraph, FERC ends a 7.5-year effort to update its approach to reviewing proposed interstate gas pipelines.” The measure would have implemented a new formula for assessing the value of new interstate gas lines that would have weighted the environment more heavily than the existing methodology, which was written in 1999. But the push to modernize the criteria after three decades “was never a serious effort,” former FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee posted on X. “We got bullied into starting it and put on a show for years to hold protesters at bay. Just being honest. R and D led @ferc majorities both faked it.”
Ram has canceled its electric pickup truck, long expected to be a competitor to the battery-powered versions of the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet Silverado, InsideEVs reported. Parent company Stellantis said it would discontinue the 2026 battery-powered Ram 1500 REV “as demand for full-size battery-electric trucks slows in North America.” Rivals such as GM have seen a boom in EV sales in recent months, that is likely driven by the law Trump signed that rapidly phased out federal tax credits after this month. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently, August turned out to be the best month for EV sales “in U.S. history, with just over 146,000 units sold, comprising almost 10% of total car sales that month.” Ford is still investing in what is billed as a Model T moment for EV construction. And, as I have reported here in this newsletter, Tesla’s plunge in popularity — even with former customers — has opened up more of the EV market to other vendors.
Though Ram’s all-electric pickup truck turned out to be a non-starter, its extended-range battery electric truck, formerly known as the Ramcharger, will now take on the 1500 REV moniker with a 2026 launch date. As Heatmap contributor and Shift Key podcast cohost Jesse Jenkins wrote when the Ramcharger was announced, “The economics and capabilities of a range-extended EV thus make a lot of sense, especially for massive vehicles like the full-size trucks and SUVs so many Americans love. And they squash any concerns about range anxiety that might give buyers pause.”
Scientists have long sought an economical way to harness renewable power from waves. But as Julian Spector wrote in Canary Media: “The first rule of wave power startups is that they always fail. But a plucky company called Eco Wave Power is doing its best to prove that rule wrong, and it just notched an important win in Los Angeles.” The company this month installed a 100-kilowatt system on a concrete wharf in the port of Los Angeles, with seven steel floaters affixed to a central structure that bobs in the waves, “building up hydraulic pressure that gets converted to electric power by machinery in shipping containers on shore.” If the pilot pans out and Eco Wave gets a chance to bid on a larger area of the port, the technology could — at least in theory — generate power 90% of the time, supplying electrons at a capacity factor higher than almost any other energy source besides nuclear.
Why killing a government climate database could essentially gut a tax credit
The Trump administration’s bid to end an Environmental Protection Agency program may essentially block any company — even an oil firm — from accessing federal subsidies for capturing carbon or producing hydrogen fuel.
On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed that it would stop collecting and publishing greenhouse gas emissions data from thousands of refineries, power plants, and factories across the country.
The Trump administration argues that the scheme, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, costs more than $2 billion and isn’t legally required under the Clean Air Act. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, described the program as “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”
But the program is more important than the Trump administration lets on. It’s true that the policy, which required more than 8,000 different facilities around the country to report their emissions, helped the EPA and outside analysts estimate the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
But it did more than that. Over the past decade, the program had essentially become the master database of carbon pollution and emissions policy across the American economy. “Essentially everything the federal government does related to emissions reductions is dependent on the [Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program],” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me.
That means other federal programs — including those that Republicans in Congress have championed — have come to rely on the EPA database.
Among those programs: the federal tax credit for capturing and using carbon dioxide. Republicans recently increased the size of that subsidy, nicknamed 45Q after a section of the tax code, for companies that turn captured carbon into another product or use it to make oil wells more productive. Those changes were passed in President Trump’s big tax and spending law over the summer.
But Zeldin’s scheme to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program would place that subsidy off limits for the foreseeable future. Under federal law, companies can only claim the 45Q tax credit if they file technical details to the EPA’s emissions reporting program.
Another federal tax credit, for companies that use carbon capture to produce hydrogen fuel, also depends on the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. That subsidy hasn’t received the same friendly treatment from Republicans, and it will now phase out in 2028.
The EPA program is “the primary mechanism by which companies investing in and deploying carbon capture and hydrogen projects quantify the CO2 that they’re sequestering, such that they qualify for tax incentives,” Jane Flegal, a former Biden administration appointee who worked on industrial emissions policy, told me. She is now the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation.
“The only way for private capital to be put to work to deploy American carbon capture and hydrogen projects is to quantify the carbon dioxide that they’re sequestering, in some way,” she added. That’s what the EPA program does: It confirms that companies are storing or using as much carbon as they claim they are to the IRS.
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is “how the IRS communicates with the EPA” when companies claim the 45Q credit, Cavanaugh said. “The IRS obviously has taxpayer-sensitive information, so they’re not able to give information to the EPA about who or what is claiming the credit.” The existence of the database lets the EPA then automatically provide information to the IRS, so that no confidential tax information is disclosed.
Zeldin’s announcement that the EPA would phase out the program has alarmed companies planning on using the tax credit. In a statement, the Carbon Capture Coalition — an alliance of oil companies, manufacturers, startups, and NGOs — called the reporting program the “regulatory backbone” of the carbon capture tax credit.
“It is not an understatement that the long-term success of the carbon management industry rests on the robust reporting mechanisms” in the EPA’s program, the group said.
Killing the EPA program could hurt American companies in other ways. Right now, companies that trade with European firms depend on the EPA data to pass muster with the EU’s carbon border adjustment tax. It’s unclear how they would fare in a world with no EPA data.
It could also sideline GOP proposals. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, has suggested that imports to the United States should pay a foreign pollution fee — essentially, a way of accounting for the implicit subsidy of China’s dirty energy system. But the data to comply with that law would likely come from the EPA’s greenhouse gas database, too.
Ending the EPA database wouldn’t necessarily spell permanent doom for the carbon capture tax credit, but it would make it much harder to use in the years to come. In order to re-open the tax credit for applications, the Treasury Department, the Energy Department, the Interior Department, and the EPA would have to write new rules for companies that claim the 45Q credit. These rules would go to the end of the long list of regulations that the Treasury Department must write after Trump’s spending law transformed the tax code.
That could take years — and it could sideline projects now under construction. “There are now billions of dollars being invested by the private sector and the government in these technologies, where the U.S. is positioned to lead globally,” Flegal said. Changing the rules would “undermine any way for the companies to succeed.”
Ditching the EPA database, however, very well could doom carbon capture-based hydrogen projects. Under the terms of Trump’s tax law, companies that want to claim the hydrogen credit must begin construction on their projects by 2028.
The Trump administration seems to believe, too, that gutting the EPA database may require new rules for the carbon capture tax credit. When asked for comment, an EPA spokesperson pointed me to a line in the agency’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
The EPA spokesperson then encouraged me to ask the Treasury Department for anything more about “specific implications.”