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They fall short of President Biden’s power plant goals — and he’s running out of time and tools.

As you may have heard, the Biden administration on Thursday proposed regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from new and existing power plants.
The rule is a landmark. If implemented successfully, it would mark the first time that the United States has regulated emissions from existing power plants, one of the largest sources of carbon pollution in the economy.
Yet coverage of the rule has deviated in some respects from what it would actually do. The rule falls short of its goals in at least one important way: It will not meet President Joe Biden’s targets for the power sector.
Soon after he took office, President Biden committed the United States to generating 100% of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2035. It is part of his broader Paris Agreement pledge to slash U.S. carbon pollution in half by 2030 as compared to 2005 levels.
But the EPA’s proposal would not achieve a zero-carbon power grid even by 2040, five years after the president’s deadline. If the rule is implemented, then the American electricity system will emit 458 million metric tons of carbon pollution in 2040. While that is a significant reduction — it’s about 70% lower than today’s annual emissions — it is obviously not zero.
“These rules and this section of the Clean Air Act is not designed to achieve President Biden’s clean power targets,” Charles Harper, a policy analyst at Evergreen, a climate advocacy organization and think tank, told me.
“These power-sector rules are an important contributor to reducing emissions to the power sector, but they alone won’t get to a zero-carbon grid — and that’s by design within the statute.”
On one hand, the EPA’s proposal reveals the success of President Biden’s flagship climate accomplishment, the Inflation Reduction Act. The EPA’s proposal can mandate carbon capture and storage so aggressively because that law’s subsidies and tax credits made it economically feasible for utilities. The proposal is “designed very, very well to work in tandem with the IRA tax credits,” Nick Bryner, a law professor at Louisiana State University, told me.
In fact, according to the rule’s analysis, the climate law — and not the proposed rule — will drive most of the emissions declines in the power sector from 2028 to 2040. The rule is tinkering around the edges of a much larger transformation.
But on the other hand, the rule reveals the limits of that metamorphosis. The Biden administration has adopted more climate policy than any previous administration, yet they are running out of tools to make their climate goals a reality. The EPA will be lucky to finalize these rules before the end of Biden’s first — and potentially only — term. And it is not working on any other proposed power-sector regulation that might get the country all the way to Biden’s 2035 goal.
At this point, Biden may need a revolution of state and local climate advocacy — not to mention another four years in office, and perhaps even another congressional majority — to achieve his most ambitious climate goals. The planet is only getting hotter.
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With Trump turning the might of the federal government against the decarbonization economy, these investors are getting ready to consolidate — and, hopefully, profit.
Since Trump’s inauguration, investors have been quick to remind me that some of the world’s strongest, most resilient companies have emerged from periods of uncertainty, taking shape and cementing their market position amid profound economic upheaval.
On the one hand, this can sound like folks grasping at optimism during a time when Washington is taking a hammer to both clean energy policies and valuable sources of government funding. But on the other hand — well, it’s true. Google emerged from the dot-com crash with its market lead solidified, Airbnb launched amid the global financial crisis, and Sunrun rose to dominance after the first clean tech bubble burst.
The circumstances may change, but behind all of these against-the-odds successes are investors who saw opportunity where others saw risk. In the climate tech landscape of 2025, well-capitalized investors are eyeing some of the more mature sectors being battered by federal policy or market uncertainty — think solar, wind, biogas, and electric transportation — rather than the fresh-faced startups pursuing more cutting edge tech.
“History does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me. He was working as the chief commercial officer at the solar company Suntech Power when the first climate tech bubble collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, venture capital and project financing dried up instantly, as banks and investors faced heavy losses from their exposure to risky assets. This time around, “there’s plenty of capital at all stages of venture,” as well as infrastructure investing, he said. That means firms can afford to swoop in to finance or acquire undervalued startups and established companies alike.
“I think you’re gonna see a lot of projects in development change hands,” Beebe told me.
Investors don’t generally publicize when the companies or projects that they’re backing become “distressed assets,” i.e. are in financial trouble, nor do they broadcast when their explicit goal is to turn said projects around. But that’s often what opportunistic investing entails.
“As investors in the energy and infrastructure space — which is inherently in transition — we take it as a very important point of our strategy to be opportunistic,” Giulia Siccardo, a managing director at Quinbrook, told me. (Prior to joining the investment firm, Siccardo was director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing & Energy Supply Chains under President Biden.)
Quinbrook sees opportunities in biogas and renewable natural gas, a sector that once enjoyed “very cushioned margins” thanks to investor interest in corporate sustainability, Siccardo told me, but which has lately gone into a “rapid decline.” But she’s also looking at solar and storage, where developers are rushing to build projects before tax credits expire, as well as grid and transmission infrastructure, given the dire need for upgrades and buildout as load growth increases.
As of now, the only investment Quinbrook has explicitly described as opportunistic is its acquisition of a biomethane facility in Junction City, Oregon. When it opened in 2013, the facility used food waste — which otherwise would have emitted methane in a landfill — to produce renewable biogas for clean electricity generation. But after Shell acquired the plant, it switched to converting cow manure and agricultural residue into renewable natural gas for heavy-duty transportation fuels, a process that it’s operated commercially since 2021. Siccardo declined to provide information about the plant’s performance at the time of Quinbrook’s acquisition, though presumably, it has yet to reach its total production capacity of 730,000 million British thermal units per year — enough to supply about 12,000 U.S. households.
The extension of the clean fuel production tax credit, plus the potential for hyperscalers to purchase RNG credits, are still driving demand, however. And that’s increased Siccardo’s confidence in pursuing investments and acquisitions in the space. “That’s a market that, from a policy standpoint, has actually been pretty stable — and you might even say favored — by the One Big Beautiful Bill relative to other technologies,” she explained.
Solar, meanwhile, is still cheap and quick to deploy, with or without the tax credits, Siccardo told me. “If you strip away all subsidies, and are just looking at, what is the technology that’s delivering the lowest cost electron, and which technology has the least supply chain bottlenecks right now in North America —- that drives you to solar and storage,” she said.
Another leading infrastructure investment firm, Generate Capital, is also looking to cash in on the moment. After replacing its CEO and enacting company-wide layoffs, Generate’s head of external affairs, Jonah Goldman, told me that “managers who understand the [climate] space and who can take advantage of the opportunities that are underpriced in this tougher market environment are set up to succeed.”
The firm also sees major opportunities when it comes to good old solar and storage projects. In an open letter, Generate’s new CEO, David Crane, wrote that “for the first time in nearly four decades, the U.S. has an insatiable need for more power: as much as we can produce, as soon as we can, wherever and however we can produce it.”
Crane sees it as the duty of Generate and other investors to use mergers and acquisitions as a tool to help clean tech scale and mature. “If companies across our subsectors were publicly traded, the market itself would act as a centripetal force towards industry consolidation,” he wrote. But because many clean energy companies are privately funded, Crane said “it is up to us, the providers of that private capital, to force industry improvement, through consolidation and otherwise.”
Helping solar companies accelerate their construction timelines to lock in tax credit eligibility has actually become an opportunistic market of its own, Chris Creed, a managing partner at Galvanize Climate Solutions and co-head of its credit division, told me. “Helping those companies that need to start or complete their projects within a predetermined time frame because of changes in the tax credit framework became an investable opportunity for us,” Creed told me. “We have a number of deals in our near term pipeline that basically came about as a result of that.”
Given that some solar companies are bound to fare better than others, he agreed that mergers and acquisitions were likely — among competitors as well as involving companies working in different stages of a supply chain. “It wouldn’t shock me if you saw some horizontal consolidation or some vertical integration,” Creed told me.
Consolidation can only go so far, though. So while investors seem to agree that solar, storage, and even the administration’s nemesis — wind — are positioned for a long and fruitful future, when it comes to more emergent technologies, not all will survive the headwinds. Beebe thinks there’s been “irrational exuberance” around both green hydrogen and direct air capture, for example, and that seasoned investors will give those spaces a pass.
Electric mobility — e.g. EVs, electric planes, and even electrified shipping — and grid scalability — which includes upgrades to make the grid more efficient, flexible, and optimized — are two sectors that Beebe is betting will survive the turmoil.
But for all investors that have the capability to do so, for now, “the easy bet is just to move your money outside the U.S.” Beebe told me.
We might be starting to see just that. Quinbrook also invests in the U.K. and Australia, and just announced its first Canadian investment last week. It acquired an ownership stake in Elemental Clean Fuels, an energy developer making renewable fuels such as RNG, low-carbon methanol, and — yes — clean hydrogen.
Last week, Generate announced that it had closed $43 million in funding from the Canadian company Fiera Infrastructure Private Debt for its North American portfolio of anaerobic digestion projects, which produce renewable natural gas — Generate’s first cross-currency, cross-border deal.
Creed still has confidence in the U.S. market, however, telling me he’s “very bullish on American innovation.” He certainly acknowledges that it’s a tough time out there for any investor deciding where to park their money, but thinks that ultimately, “that volatility should manifest itself as excess returns to investors who are able to figure out their investment strategy and deploy in this environment.”
Exactly what firms will manage this remains an open question, and the opportunities may be short-lived — but it’s a race that plenty of investors are getting in on.
“I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate.”
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s most important funders of climate-related causes, has a new message: Lighten up on the “doomsday.”
In a new memo, called “Three tough truths about climate,” Gates calls for a “strategic pivot.” Climate-concerned philanthropy should focus on global health and poverty, he says, which will still cause more human suffering than global warming.
“I’m not saying we should ignore temperature-related deaths because diseases are a bigger problem,” he writes. “What I am saying is that we should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause, and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health so that extreme weather isn’t such a threat to them.”
This new focus didn’t come with a change in funding priorities — but that’s partly because some big shake-ups have already happened. In February, Heatmap reported that Breakthrough Energy, Gates’ climate-focused funding group, had slashed its grant-making budget. Gates later closed Breakthrough’s policy and advocacy office altogether.
Despite eliminating those financial commitments, he still dwells on two of his longtime obsessions in the new memo: cutting the “green premium” for energy technologies, meaning the delta between the cost of carbon-emitting and clean energy technologies, and improving the measurement of how spending can do the most for human welfare. The same topics dominated his thinking when I last spoke to the billionaire at the 2023 United Nations climate conference in Dubai.
What seems to have shifted, instead, is the global political environment. The Trump administration and Elon Musk gutted the federal government’s spending on global public health causes, such as vaccines and malaria prevention. European countries have also cut back their global aid spending, although not as dramatically as the U.S.
Gates seemingly now feels called to their defense: “Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent,” he writes, praising the vaccine alliance Gavi in particular. “Energy innovation is a good buy not because it saves lives now, but because it will provide cheap clean energy and eventually lower emissions, which will have large benefits for human welfare in the future.”
Last week, Gates shared his thinking about climate change at a roundtable with a handful of reporters. He was, as always, engaging. I’ve shared some of his new takes on climate policy below. His quotes have been edited for clarity.
The environment we’re in today, the policies for climate change are less accommodating. It’s hard to name a country where you’d say, Oh, the climate policies are more accommodating today than they have been in the past.
The thesis I had was that middle income countries — who were already, at that time, the majority of all emissions — would never pay a premium for greenness. And so you could say, well, maybe the rich countries should subsidize that. But you know, the amounts involved would get you up to, like, 4% of rich country budgets would have to be transferred to do that. And we’re at 1% and going down. And there are some other worthy things that that money goes for, other than subsidizing positive green premium type approaches. So the thesis in the book [How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021] is we had to innovate our way to negative green premiums for the middle income countries.
Climate [change] is an evil thing in that it’s caused by rich countries and high middle-income countries and the primary burden [falls on poor countries]. When I looked into climate activists, I said, Well, this is incredible. They care about poor countries so much. That’s wonderful, that they feel guilty about it. But in fact, a lot of climate activists, they have such an extreme view of what’s going to happen in rich countries — their climate activism is not because they care about poor farmers and Africa, it’s because they have some purported view that, like, New York City, can’t deal with the flooding or the heat.
The other challenge we have in the climate movement is in order to have some degree of accountability, it was very focused on short-term goals and per-country reports. And the per-country reporting thing is, in a way, a good thing, because a country — certainly when it comes to deforestation or what it’s doing on its electric grid, there is sovereign accountability for what’s being done. But I mean, the way everybody makes steel is the same. The way everybody makes the cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same. And so there can’t be some wonderful surprise, where some country comes in and, you know, gives you this little number [for its Paris Agreement goals], and you go, Wow, good! You’re so tough, you’re so good, you’re so amazing. Because other than deforestation and your particular electric grid, these are all global things.
If you’re a rich country, the costs of adaptation are just one of many, many things that are not gigantic, huge percentages of GDP — you know, rebuilding L.A. so that it’s like the Getty Museum, in terms of there’s no brush that can catch on fire, there’s no roof that can catch on fire, adds about 10% cost to the rebuild. It’s not like, Oh my god, we can’t live in LA. There’s no apocalyptic story for rich countries. [Climate adaptation] is one of many things that you should pay attention to, like, Does your health system work? Does your education system work? Does your political system work? There are a variety of things that are also quite important.
The place where it gets really tough is in these poor countries. But you know, what is the greatest tool for climate adaptation? Getting rich — growing your economy is the biggest single thing, living in conditions where you don’t face big climate problems. So when you say to an African country, Hey, you have a natural gas deposit, and we’re going to try to block you from getting financing for using that natural gas deposit … It probably won’t work, because there’s a lot of money in the world. It’s not clear how you’d achieve that. And it’s also in terms of the warming effect of that natural gas, versus the improvement of the conditions of the people in that country — it’s not even a close thing.
People in the [climate] movement, we do have to say to ourselves, For the Europeans, how much were they willing to pay in order to support climate? — and did we overestimate in terms of forcing them to switch to electric cars, to buy electric heat pumps, to have their price of electricity be higher? Did we overestimate their willingness to pay with some of those policies? And you do have to be careful because if your climate policies are too aggressive, you will be unelected, and you’ll have a right-wing government that cares not a bit about climate. I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate. You worry they care so much about it that the people you talk to, you won’t be able to meet with them again, because they won’t be in power.
On EV investments hitting the brakes, Google’s nuclear restart, and a new data center consensus
Current conditions: Cyclone Montha is poised to make landfall over the Andhra Pradesh coast in eastern India with winds of up to 62 miles per hour • South Africa’s Northern Cape faces extremely high fire risks • Southwest California is also facing high risk of wildfires amid Santa Ana winds and dry, warm conditions today and tomorrow.

Hurricane Melissa has strengthened into a major storm, threatening to make landfall over Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba as a Category 5 hurricane in the next few hours, with winds up to 180 miles per hour and more than four feet of rainfall. It’s likely to be the strongest storm to hit Jamaica since records started in 1851, with storm surge lapping the coast with waves of up to 15 feet. Already the storm has killed at least six people in the northern Caribbean. Evacuations started on Monday. “This can quickly escalate into a humanitarian crisis where a large number of people are in need of basic supplies such as food, safe drinking water, housing and medical care,” AccuWeather forecasters warned on Monday. “The prolonged nature of impacts can result in entire communities being cut off from aid and support for multiple days.”
The U.S. is just weeks away from reviving a shuttered nuclear plant for the first time, as Holtec International’s Palisades plant in Michigan nears its restart. Once that’s done, the Microsoft-backed project to revive the still-operable reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility is likely the next nuclear site to come back from permanent decommissioning. Add another to the list. On Monday, Google inked a deal to back the restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, Iowa’s only atomic power station. As I reported in this newsletter back in August, NextEra was already considering a restart of the station, which shut down in 2020. It is, as my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in August, the zenith of the "nuclear dealmaking boom.”
The move comes as the U.S. finally embraces large-scale reactors again after years of pegging all future hopes of new nuclear construction on as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors. On Tuesday, the U.S. government announced an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to build a fleet of at least eight new power plants with a mix of gigawatt-sized AP1000s and some smaller versions, the Financial Times reported.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has breaking news on New York’s energy future: Swiftsure, a 650-megawatt battery energy storage development planned for New York’s Staten Island, was quietly scuttled in August. Rather than make a public announcement, the developer, Fullmark Energy (formerly Hecate), instead wrote a letter to the New York State Department of Public Service withdrawing the proposal. As Jael wrote, “nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.” The project faced heavy opposition, including from New York Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. The campaigns of Democrat Zohran Mamdani and independent Andrew Cuomo did not respond to requests for comment.
In other local news, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange is out with a remarkable new series called The Aftermath, a look at surviving the infernos that are increasingly a fact of life in parts of the U.S., especially out West. The series includes stories on the challenges involved in evacuation, why relocation can be impossible, the stories of wildfires that don’t capture national attention, the limits of what the public knows and doesn’t know about wildfires, and the buffers towns such as the fire-scorched Paradise, California, are trying to establish.
Investments in electric vehicle-related infrastructure, including batteries factories, vehicle assembly plants, and charging stations, tumbled by nearly a third to $8.1 billion in the three months leading to September compared to the same period a year earlier, according to the Financial Times. The analysis, based on data from the U.S. Clean Investment Monitor, found that about $7 billion of planned EV investments were abandoned between April and September. The pullback could define the West’s place in the EV industry for years to come, widening China’s lead over production of battery-powered cars. “We need to … be quicker in development to compete with the Chinese,” Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars, told the newspaper. “As soon as you weaken these signals, everything will slow down,” he added, referring to the knock-on effect of policy changes emanating from the White House.
When Secretary of Energy Chris Wright last week directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track interconnection request for large new energy users, he also endorsed the somewhat controversial idea that big electricity users such as data centers should dial back their operations from time to time when the grid is stressed, Latitude Media’s Lisa Martine Jenkins reported last week. On Monday, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI threw its weight behind the idea. In a letter to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Christopher Lehane, OpenAI’s chief government affairs officer, called on regulators to “expand use of curtailable load resources and modernize interconnection policy.” Lehane said “we welcomed the news last week that” Wright had expressed support for the policy. “To strengthen grid reliability and expand capacity for AI and other flexible loads, FERC should allow more demand-side participation in wholesale markets and speed up interconnection for large loads that can curtail,” he added.
The idea has been gaining momentum since Duke Energy researcher Tyler Norris put out a landmark paper in February identifying up to 100 gigawatts of additional load the grid could absorb if data centers simply adopted a policy of reducing power consumption when there was a shortage of electrons. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called it “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
Carbon removal startup Rewind has launched DMS Georgia, the first commercial-scale carbon removal operation using deep mine storage. It’s the first time a certified carbon credit will be delivered by plant-based carbon in naturally oxygen-free underground environments. The project aims to bury carbon-emitting biomass in environments where the lack of oxygen makes decomposition impossible. By 2030, Rewind aims to remove one million metric tons of carbon per year.