You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
A smooth transition to clean energy will require coordinating on oil prices — just not the way Scott Sheffield was doing it.
The Federal Trade Commission earlier this month threw sand in the gears of one of several big oil company deals currently in the works, the $60 billion acquisition of shale oil company Pioneer by Exxon. While the FTC didn’t block the sale, it said that Pioneer’s chief executive, Scott Sheffield, could not join Exxon’s board, as proposed in the merger agreement, because of his role in seeking to coordinate oil production and push up prices.
It was yet another Rorschach test of the mid-transition — oil folk saw regulator overreach or pettiness under a Democratic administration, while climate campaigners saw shameless profiteering by the oil industry. What it really reveals is more complex: The illusion of laissez-faire oil markets; the disingenuousness (if not hypocrisy) of the U.S. oil industry; and the need for U.S. policymakers to take a much more interventionist stance in oil markets.
First, the FTC complaint. Sheffield, fêted in the oil world as one of the key instigators of the U.S. shale oil boom, has called on peers in the sector to refrain from drilling when prices were low. The commission also quoted public remarks by Sheffield referring to U.S. oil companies “staying in line,” being disciplined in their production, and being punished by shareholders if they sought to grow production.
He went further than that, though, according to the FTC. In a heavily redacted section of the complaint, the Commission describes Sheffield meeting with OPEC officials and communicating with them by WhatsApp. “If Texas leads the way, maybe we can get OPEC to cut production. Maybe Saudi and Russia will follow. That was our plan,”he said in one text message cited by the Commission. He added: “I was using the tactics of OPEC+ to get a bigger OPEC+ done.” Pioneer issued a statement saying that circumventing competition rules was “neither the intent nor the effect” of Sheffield’s comments and pointing to Pioneer’s role in increasing U.S. production.
Coordinating on prices, however, is the norm in the history of oil markets — even in the U.S. It shouldn’t be so shocking that the purportedly free market-loving oil industry would engage in this kind of behavior.
A lot of Sheffield’s activity mentioned by the FTC took place from around 2020 to 2023, when oil demand was still uncertain thanks to Covid. Even before then, the U.S. shale industry, which had boomed through the late 2010s, was under pressure from institutional investors, frustrated as all the new supply undermined their profits. Exxon, whose antecedent Rockefeller famously took control of transport to manage the oil market, is so big and cash-rich that it can largely ride out market fluctuations; the smaller and newer shale oil producers, reliant on increasingly impatient investors, could not.
No wonder Sheffield was vocal about restricting supply: He had a large company and a high profile among a sea of smaller players that were fracking madly even as prices fell.
Oil prices are notoriously volatile, which serves neither producers nor consumers. If prices are too low, the industry logic goes, no-one invests. Too high, and there’s a risk that demand for the stuff falls — especially if it prompts a recession. To keep prices in a sweet spot, a good chunk of the market has to be prepared to refrain from pumping. Turning the taps on and off is a role that Saudi Arabia and fellow OPEC petrostates have taken for decades. The nature of shale oil means it is a “swing producer” that can switch up and down its output with relative ease compared to other producers.
The market dynamics changed quickly when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Since then, U.S. oil producers have been pumping more than ever, to the point where the country is now the world’s biggest producer. None of this has stopped the industry from continuing to loathe the Biden administration, of course. (Sheffield himself said in 2021 that the administration was trying “to slow down U.S. drilling in any way they can.”)
The U.S. government is the one actor with enough power to influence global oil demand that has largely sat on its hands. The oil industry often engages in a kind of collective delayed gratification to keep oil prices in a sweet spot: high enough to maximize profits, but not so high that households and businesses start cutting back on their fuel use. Far less effort has gone into a kind of reverse strategy. There have been few attempts to reduce supply without disruptive price volatility — the kind of government inaction that pits voters against lawmakers and hurts households that really feel the pinch from higher gasoline prices.
Having intervened extensively in the preceding decades, during the 1980s, the U.S. government backed away from the complex price controls of the Nixon presidency and the demand-curtailing measures of Carter’s. With OPEC’s strategy being fairly straightforward, a couple of decades of relative stability followed, along with the assumption that the market would self-correct whenever prices went too high for consumers or too low for producers. Bassam Fattouh of Oxford Institute for Energy Studies argued that it was the perception of a self-correcting supply-demand dynamic that “stabilized long term expectations about oil prices”in that period.
The “mid-transition” idea, developed by academics Emily Grubert and Sara Hastings-Simon in a 2022 paper, asserts that the process of decarbonization involves a drawn-out, messy, liminal phase, during which changes to energy costs and supply will shape a society’s perception of clean energy so much that negative experiences like price spikes or supply interruptions will undermine political support for the transition.
In 2023, the Biden administration broke the U.S. government’s longstanding precedent and began intervening in oil prices with an eye beyond manipulating the immediate consumer price. It announced a target price for buying several hundred million barrels of oil to restock the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which had been depleted after the invasion of Ukraine sent prices spiking. By pledging to buy crude whenever the price was between $67 and $72 a barrel, it would do what Employ America, a think tank, had proposed: Set a floor under prices that would help U.S. producers, as well as a ceiling that would avoid pain at the pump.
“Mid-transition” is a relatively new concept, but it harks back to a more established phrase in climate policy: “smooth transition,” which describes a pathway to decarbonization that is steady but not disruptive. Stimulating or restraining oil production in a way that stabilizes oil investment and prices — if done effectively and with the right intentions — is a necessary condition for such smoothness. Sheffield and other producers, including OPEC+ members, have for decades sought to manage oil supply to ensure that price spikes don’t disrupt oil’s future. For all that the U.S. oil industry castigates the Biden administration, they are actually pursuing the same goal, just with a different view of the end game.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Some of the arguments will ring a bell to anyone who’s been following fights against renewables.
Indiana has power. Indiana has transmission. Indiana has a business-friendly Republican government. Indiana is close to Chicago but — crucially — not in Illinois. All of this has led to a huge surge of data center development in the “Crossroads of America.” It has also lead to an upswell of local opposition.
There are almost 30 active data center proposals in Indiana, plus five that have already been rejected in the past year, according to data collected by the environmentalist group Citizens Action Coalition. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all announced projects in the state since the beginning of 2024.
Nipsco, one of the state’s utilities, has projected 2,600 megawatts worth of new load by the middle of the next decade as its base scenario, mostly attributable to “large economic development projects.” In a more aggressive scenario, it sees 3,200 megawatts of new load — that’s three large nuclear reactors’ worth — by 2028 and 8,600 megawatts by 2035. While short of, say, the almost 36,500 megawatts worth of load growth planned in Georgia for the next decade, it’s still a vast range of outcomes that requires some kind of advanced planning.
That new electricity consumption will likely be powered by fossil fuels. Projected load growth in the state has extended a lifeline to Indiana’s coal-fired power plants, with retirement dates for some of the fleet being pushed out to late in the 2030s. It’s also created a market for new natural gas-fired plants that utilities say are necessary to power the expected new load.
State and local political leaders have greeted these new data center projects with enthusiasm, Ben Inskeep, the program director at CAC, told me. “Economic development is king here,” he said. “That is what all the politicians and regulators say their number one concern is: attracting economic development.”
This can sometimes mean policies to support data center development that CAC describes as giveaways, such as utility customers having to cover the bill for transmission upgrades and a 50-year sales tax exemption specifically for data centers. It’s all in the name of economic development and job growth, but that comes at “the detriment of ratepayers and taxpayers,” Inskeep told me.
Take that sales tax exemption: A 1,000 megawatt data center might face $500 million in annual electricity costs, Inskeep told me. “If they’re not having to pay that 7% sales tax on half a billion dollars, times 50 years, we’re talking about $1.7 billion per data center in sales tax exemption, just on the electricity portion of their bill,” Inskeep said.
Even that $500 million is not guaranteed. The minimum payment for such a data center has to pay is $332 million — having been doubled from just $173 million after CAC petitioned for an increase. Ratepayer advocates celebrated the settlement because it guaranteed that large data centers would pay for some of the costs they impose on the whole electrical system, even if their actual consumption is not as high as forecast.
Indiana is “an ideal jurisdiction for data center siting given its physical advantages such as available land, access to grid transmission, water, fiber optic cables, proximity to population centers,” Mizuho Securities analyst Gabriel Moreen wrote in a note to clients. “The state has demonstrated a political and economic receptivity to data centers, such as tax incentives for building data centers and political support at local and state levels.”
But cracks in that edifice of political support may be beginning to show. While data center development has substantial support from the state government — a bill tospeed up regulatory approvals for data centers and the generation to serve them is on Governor Mike Braun’s desk after a party-line statehouse vote — projects are also being withdrawn in the face of popular outrage.
Earlier this month, county commissioners in Kosciusko County rejected a rezoning proposition that would have been necessary for a data center project on rural land near Leesburg after a number of local residents spoke out against it. Before that, the city of Valparaiso rejected a data center project in March, following a city council meeting where residents complained about “ noise, power and water consumption and the impact on property values,” according to Lakeshore Public Media.
The objections in Kosciusko County and across the state will not be unfamiliar to anyone with experience in large scale development — residents don’t like noise; they worry that the projects will lead to higher electricity costs across the board; they’re skeptical of the job benefits; they think the developers are getting taxpayer giveaways; they don’t want to see agricultural land converted for the sake industry.
“That’s a big red flag for a lot of local governments where they’re a bit more skeptical of those types of development,” Inskeep told me.
Of course, these objections will be familiar to anyone who follows local opposition to renewable power developments like wind and solar, which regularly draw on farm land, noise, and skepticism of promised economic benefits.
And just like with solar and wind, these local objections could be slowing a projected build out that many analysts simply assume will follow an exponential path — which would, ironically, put a dent in the demand growth that many energy developers, renewable or not, are hoping to ride to more profits.
But at the local level, for activists, the fight happens one project at a time, Inskeep told me.
“We’re building out tools to help local folks feel like they have the knowledge and the resources to be able to engage at these local levels. Because when we have several dozen data center proposals in the state of Indiana and more coming, a small organization like ours can’t be there for each individual fight,” Inskeep said.
Maybe you remember the time before the “basic economy” fare. A ticket on a major airline like Delta or United used to come with a few automatic amenities, like the ability to choose one’s seats — or, before 2008, even to check a bag without a fee. In the 2010s, facing rising costs and competition from the likes of Spirit and Frontier, the big airlines began to embrace the a la carte approach of the budget airlines: Passengers could buy an uber-cheap fare, but anything beyond a seat on the plane and a Diet Coke became an upsell.
The trajectory of air travel was on my mind this week as the world learned more details about Slate. The EV startup backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others, revealed its compact electric pickup to the world, and the world was struck by the vehicle’s simplicity. The little truck represents a kind of bare-bones transportation not seen at American car dealerships in decades, with power windows and plain metal panels coming standard — and everything else as an add-on.
Its success or failure will tell us something about Americans’ appetite for the kind of truly compact trucks that disappeared from our roads when bloat came for the pickup. It will tell us even more about whether Americans, faced with a lousy economy and skyrocketing car prices, are ready for the Spirit Airlines model to come to the automotive world.
Slate’s name is a clear reference to the idea of a blank slate. The base version of the little electric truck comes with manually adjustable rear view mirrors, no built-in infotainment system, and an uninspiring 150 miles of range. The exterior comes in any color the customer wants, as long as it’s the hue of plain, unadorned metal.
The little truck’s pitch is about the power of customization. Buyers will be able to choose from more than 100 add-on features, including roll bars, more airbags, and extra seats. There will be kits to lower the truck, kits to raise the truck, kits to turn the truck into an SUV. Most of these additions are advertised as DIY, though once the truck arrives in 2026, Slate promises there will be service professionals to install these add-ons for those who are not weekend garage mechanics. You’ll even be able to put on a vinyl wrap to make your truck something other than gray. Just how much these additions will raise the price is not yet clear.
It’s a compelling case, and one meant to be the antithesis of the car industry’s modern approach. A typical new vehicle comes in a handful of trim levels, where each successive trim represents another tier that adds a new group of luxury or technology features. (This is what the alphabet soup on the back of a car means, if you’ve ever wondered just what Toyota RAV4 “XLE” is.) The Ford F-150, the best-selling vehicle in the country, comes in eight trim levels that take the truck from a base price around $38,000 to nearly $80,000 for the fanciest, most capable trucks. You can do some customization outside of those tiers, sure. What you can’t do is buy a brand-new F-150 for $25,000 because it comes with the best in-car amenities 1995 had to offer, even though such a vehicle would do a perfectly good job of transporting people and cargo from A to B, the thing a truck is supposed to do.
Today’s cars come in mostly neutral colors because buyers have been taught to maximize resale value and it’s easier to sell a silver truck than a teal one; Slate’s encouragement to customize the exterior is a reaction against this aesthetic staleness. And EVs, in particular, haven’t been built with the hacker or tinkerer in mind. With Tesla (led by Bezos rival Elon Musk) at the forefront of the industry and legacy automakers following its lead, electric vehicles have become smartphones on wheels — closed boxes of intimidating hardware and proprietary software. Slate is a welcome change.
One could, of course, pay for upgrades to make the flight aboard Spirit Airlines a little more tolerable. But the cheap fare is the point. Spirit may be the butt of “Weekend Update” jokes, but basic economy is a lifeline for people who need cheap air travel. The test for Slate, then, isn’t whether buyers will embrace its DIY model and get excited about configuring their own trucks, though some definitely will. It is, instead, whether the rock-bottom, dirt-cheap, simple version of the truck is enough to convince a lot of people to go electric.
Incentives will go a long way to providing the answer. With a sticker price in the mid-$20,000s, a barebones Slate truck is a tough sell compared directly to other new vehicles; its spartan interior and inferior range don’t compare well to the kinds of entry-level gasoline cars a person could buy in that price range, all of which offer at least a taste of the latest in automotive technology. But if the $7,500 federal tax credit were to stay in place despite the EV antagonist living the White House, then the basic Slate will be a new car that can be had for less than 20-grand.
That’s a tempting number for the many Americans who see their car as an appliance, not an extension of their personality, and who generally make automotive decisions with their wallets. It’s also a powerful example of how much difference incentives could make once EVs approach the affordable end of the car market. A Rivian with $7,500 knocked off is a slightly cheaper expensive car. A Chevy Equinox EV at $7,500 off is cost-competitive with combustion rivals. A Slate truck marked down by $7,500 goes from an ugly duckling to an economic lifeline for the countless Americans who need an affordable ride.
On campaigns, clean energy manufacturing, and the IEA
Current conditions: Lisbon and “most of Spain” are without power due to a massive blackout • Dubai residents are being told to limit outdoor activity today as temperatures could hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit • Monday will be “one of the most active days of severe weather so far this season” in the U.S., with meteorologists issuing a rare “high risk” warning for intense storms and destructive tornadoes across the Upper Midwest.
It’s Election Day in Canada, where Liberal Party leader Mark Carney holds a modest lead against the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre — a “stunning reversal” from late last year, when Conservatives had a 20-point lead in the national polls. But that was before President Trump’s tariffs and comments about annexing the country.
The election has been a stunning reversal in other ways, as well: In 2021, “the environment topped the list of voter concerns,” the BBC notes, and “there was a consensus between the two major parties that Canada should rapidly transition to a green economy.” But climate change has not been a central talking point of the 2025 campaigns, even for Carney, a former special envoy on climate action and finance to the United Nations.
Instead, Carney cut the country’s carbon tax on his first day as prime minister following Justin Trudeau’s resignation, and he has vowed to make Canada a “leading energy superpower” by expanding oil and gas production along with renewable energy and carbon capture and storage technology. Poilievre, a proponent of significantly expanding the nation’s oil and gas industries, has argued that “technology, not taxes, is the best way to fight climate change and protect our environment.” The winner is expected to be announced Monday night or early Tuesday morning.
Clean energy manufacturing fell in the first quarter of 2025, marking “the first decline since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed in 2022,” Barron’s writes based on a new report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rhodium Group. While clean manufacturing has more than tripled, from $2.5 billion at the end of 2022 to $14 billion in the first quarter of 2025, the surge has been driven primarily by the electric vehicle supply chain. In the first three months of the year, six manufacturing projects worth $6.9 billion in investment were canceled, representing “the highest value of cancellations on record,” while $2.1 billion in earlier-stage investments were also canceled. “Among the companies that changed their plans were T1 Energy, formerly known as Freyr Battery; Kore Power; and the electric-vehicle start-ups Nikola and Canoo,” Barron’s notes, with the report crediting some of the turbulence to the fact that the sector “faces rising headwinds from tariff escalations, an uncertain federal policy outlook, and macroeconomic pressures.”
The Trump administration is pressuring the International Energy Agency to “cease its work promoting the global shift to clean power and net-zero carbon emissions,” Politico reports. During the organization’s conference in London last week, attendees largely championed “an exciting vision of energy security and abundance from cheap, homegrown low-carbon power,” in the words of the UK’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. The U.S. acting assistant secretary of energy for international affairs, Tommy Joyce, took a different view, however, bashing net-zero policies that, he said, “harm human lives.”
Republicans have been calling for years for the U.S. to “come up with a strategy to replace leadership at the IEA,” and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice President JD Vance have pushed similar “energy dominance” narratives in their own recent international meetings. But despite what a European official described to Politico as the U.S.’s evident intention to “weaken or disable the IEA unless they’re working on our values,” a French official told reporters that “decarbonization is both an objective and a tool” of energy security and “we have no fear that the IEA will change its position.”
Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD doubled its net profit since last year, from 4.6 billion yuan to 9.2 billion yuan (about $1.3 billion), the company reported in its first-quarter earnings on Friday. The automaker also announced that its revenue increased 36% year-over-year, with total sales of EVs and hybrids rising 60% to over a million units. The earnings stand in stark contrast to Tesla’s Q1 results, which saw profits fall 71% over the first three months of the year. BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s top EV seller in 2024, and The Wall Street Journal notes that it “appears relatively insulated from the U.S. tariffs on the auto sector, having long prioritized other international markets.” You can learn more about how BYD became “the most important car company most Americans have still never heard of” by listening to this episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.
More than 200 people gathered in South Memphis on Friday night to voice their concerns about the use of gas turbines to power the supercomputer facility of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports. “We deserve clean air, and our lungs are not for sale to xAI or Elon Musk,” Democratic state Representative Justin J. Pearson said at the event.
Earlier this month, the Southern Environmental Law Center announced that it had obtained aerial images showing that the Memphis xAI facility was using at least 35 portable methane gas turbines without air permits to power its supercomputer — despite Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s claims that “only 15” were turned on while the permitting was pending. KeShaun Pearson, the president of Memphis Community Against Pollution, slammed xAI over “perpetuating environmental racism” with the illegal generators, since methane emissions have been linked to serious health problems like asthma and certain cancers. The public comment period for the plant’s operations permit for 15 gas turbines closes on April 30.
Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images
The three-year-old activist group Just Stop Oil held its final protest in London this weekend, claiming it has achieved its goal of halting the United Kingdom’s extraction of oil and gas following the Labour Party’s suspension of new exploration licenses in the North Sea in March.