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On auto imports, special elections, and Volvo’s new CEO
Current conditions: Ice storms left more than 900,000 customers without power across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana • The Table Rock Fire, which ignited in South Carolina more than a week ago, has jumped the border into North Carolina • Meteorologists are warning that unprecedented flooding in the Australian state of Queensland could go on for days.
Nearly the entire East Coast faces the threat of severe weather today from a powerful storm system that has already left thousands of customers in central and midwestern states without electricity. Roughly 100 million people will be at risk of damaging winds, hail, and possible tornadoes through Monday evening as a cold front collides with unseasonably warm air to help fuel the system. Some 300 tornadoes have already been recorded in the first three months of 2025, nearly double the number from the same time last year.
Accuweather
President Trump told NBC News over the weekend that he “couldn’t care less” if the prices of cars go up in the U.S. due to his 25% tariffs on imported vehicles and parts. “I hope they raise their prices,” he added, “because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars.” The vehicle tariffs are set to come into effect on April 3, and Bloombergreports that JPMorgan analysts expect auto prices to increase by 11% on average. “The impact for potential EV buyers is clear,” wrote Andrew Moseman for Heatmap. “New car prices will soar by thousands of dollars with Trump tariffs in place. That will be particularly troublesome for EVs, which are staring down the prospect of this administration trying to remove federal tax credits for Americans who buy electric. If you really want to get into an EV, the best bet might be to act right now before any of this madness takes effect in April.”
On the radar this week: There are two special elections tomorrow in Florida, one of which is looking surprisingly close. Democrats are hoping their candidate, Josh Weil, can flip Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, which is vacant after former Rep. Mike Waltz resigned to become national security adviser to President Trump. Weil has outraised his Republican opponent, State Senator Randy Fine, prompting concern within the GOP about the party’s razor-thin majority in the House. The other special election, for Florida’s First Congressional District, looks less competitive. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo and Jael Holzman report, the balance of the chamber has big implications for the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee debates which programs to keep and which to cut to pay for Republicans’ desired tax cuts.
Volvo CEO Jim Rowan is stepping down today and will be replaced on an interim basis by the company’s former CEO Håkan Samuelsson. The move “is somewhat surprising,” said Iulian Dnistran at InsideEVs, “seeing how last year, Volvo posted its best-ever sales, profits and revenue figures.” But Rowan recently warned of a “very challenging year” ahead as trade tensions rise. The company is expected to be hit hard by President Trump’s tariffs on imported cars, and the board is seeking a “steady hand” at the helm.
Samuelsson served in the role for about a decade leading up to 2022, before handing the reins to Rowan. Volvo’s share price has dropped by 66% over three years as the EV transition has progressed more slowly than anticipated. Last year the company abandoned its goal of selling only EVs by 2030 as demand lagged. “With fast-moving technological shifts, growing geopolitical complexity, and intensifying competition across regions, the board believes the company is best served by leadership with deep industrial experience, deep knowledge of our group, and a proven ability to execute in challenging environments,” Volvo said. Samuelsson will serve as CEO for two years as the company searches for a permanent replacement.
China has discovered a large oilfield in the South China Sea with reserves of more than 100 million tons, according to the state news agency Xinhua. The Huizhou 19-6 oilfield sits off the coast of Shenzhen and is in very deep waters, which makes it harder to explore. China is looking to become more energy independent, and the discovery could curb its oil imports. The country’s demand for oil-based fuels has been declining in part because of its rapid transition to electric vehicles. But demand is still growing for oil that gets turned into plastics and textiles. “Oil demand for petrochemicals in China rose by almost 5% in 2024 as new plants came online, a trend that is expected to continue in the next few years,” according to the International Energy Agency.
Fossil fuel emissions in the European Union fell by nearly 3% last year as the power sector moved away from coal. The decline was smaller than the 8.5% drop seen between 2022 and 2023.
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On critical minerals, Tesla’s home battery business, and India’s heat wave
Current conditions: The Silver Fire, which erupted in eastern California on Sunday, spread to 1,589 acres and is 47% contained • More than 200,000 customers in Michigan are still without power following an ice storm • Torrential downpours this week could drop four months’ worth of rain and trigger flash flooding across the Ohio Valley.
As his administration readies broad-based tariffs to be unveiled on Wednesday, President Trump is reportedly considering issuing an executive order that would fast-track permitting for deep-sea mining for critical minerals in international waters. Sources toldReuters the order would also let mining projects skip a review process and mining code put in place by the United Nations. Minerals on the seafloor – including cobalt, nickel, copper, and lithium – are essential for products including electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines, though the Trump administration hasn’t mentioned clean tech in its recent efforts to bolster the nation’s access to the materials. Last week, Trump invoked emergency powers to expand domestic critical minerals production in the name of “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology.” He is also reportedly readying tariffs on copper in an attempt to boost domestic production, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin writes.
The environmental impacts of deep-sea mining aren’t fully understood, but many fear “it could pose grave consequences for both marine life and planetary health,” as the World Resources Institute explains. Moving to bypass international safeguards would “raise tensions with other nations competing for resources in international waters, and who believe permitting should be in the hands of a global body that oversees access and resolves disputes,” reported Reuters.
New research suggests that climate change will hit the global economy much harder than previously thought. The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, combines economic models with climate change models and then factors in the effect of weather disasters on the global supply chain – something other forecasts have omitted. “We found if the Earth warms by more than 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the estimated harm to the global economy jumped from an average of 11% (under previous modelling assumptions) to 40% (under our modelling assumptions),” the researchers explained. “This level of damage could devastate livelihoods in large parts of the world.” Experts project that the world will warm by about 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100 compared to pre-industrial averages, so the new study is based on worst-case scenarios, but it suggests that current economic models are vastly underestimating the economic impact of global heating and its many knock-on effects. That said, recent documents seen byE&E News show that some of the world’s top banks now think those worst-case scenarios are looking more likely. “We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a report this month.
A group of nearly 2,000 U.S. scientists published an “SOS” to the American public, condemning what it calls a “wholesale assault on U.S. science” by the Trump administration. In the letter, published in Scientific American, the scientists say “the administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change,” and warn that “other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.
Consumers have become increasingly turned off by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s political involvement in the Trump administration, and the backlash seems to be hurting parts of the company beyond electric vehicles. According toElectrek, people looking to install home solar systems are asking for alternatives to Tesla’s Powerwall battery packs. Data from home energy solutions marketplace EnergySage shows that nearly 70% of potential home solar buyers seeking quotes in the first two months of 2025 requested an alternative supplier. “Do you offer a battery from a supplier other than Tesla?” one customer asked. “Though we have a Tesla Powerwall and love it, and we love our Tesla Model 3 and Y, we are outraged at Musk’s politics, so we don’t wish to send him more money.”
Forecasters are warning that India could see an exceptionally hot few months leading up to summer after the country experienced an unusually warm March. Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, director general of the India Meteorological Department, said on Monday that heat wave conditions are likely to persist through April and May across much of the country. “From April to June, most parts of north and east India, central India, and the plains of north-west India are expected to experience two-to-four more heatwave days than normal,” he said. India is the world’s most populous nation and the third largest greenhouse gas emitter. Most of its emissions come from the energy sector, and especially the burning of coal. The heat waves are expected to increase energy demand (and thus coal usage) as more people switch on air conditioners to keep cool. Last year, temperatures reached 123 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s Rajasthan state.
Preliminary analysis suggests that China’s recent efforts to curb air pollution may have inadvertently caused global warming to accelerate. Why? Because these moves also reduced levels of atmospheric aerosols that were helping cool things down.
They haven’t even been announced yet, but the idea that they will has sent prices soaring.
China, Canada, Mexico, steel, aluminum, cars, and soon, copper. That’s what the market has concluded following a Bloomberg News report last week that copper tariffs would arrive far sooner than the 270 days President Trump gave the Department of Commerce to conduct its investigation into “dumping” of the metal.
Copper has been dubbed the “metal of electrification,” and demand for it is expected to skyrocket under any reasonable scenario to contain global temperature rise. Even according to a U.S. administration that, at best, neglects climate change considerations, copper is an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience,” as the Trump White House said while announcing its investigation into copper imports.
The effort to boost domestic production of copper did not start with this White House, but it has historically run into the same problems that beset the mining industry: New production can take decades to begin, even after you find the minerals you’re looking for underground. And if demand is not assured — if, for instance, subsidies for electric vehicles filled with copper disappear — then investing in new production could lead to bankruptcy, whereas holding back on new capacity would, at worst, mean forgoing some profits.
The Trump administration and the broader energy and foreign policy community have been, in general, obsessed with rocks — critical minerals, rare earths, and other minerals that are indeed “critical” to much of the economy but are not listed as such. Copper sits somewhere between these categories — while it does not appear on the United States Geological Survey list of critical minerals, which ranges from aluminum and antimony to zinc and zirconium, it does appear on the Department of Energy’s list of “critical materials.”
These lists guide federal data collection efforts, and that data can then get used to guide policymaking. Being on these lists doesn’t guarantee that a related program will get funding, but it does mean that the data is there to draw from should someone need to make a case for why their program should get funding.
This gap between the lists has been a target for Congress, especially for legislators in the Southwest, where much of America’s copper is mined. The discrepancies in the list is essentially a matter of focus for the Energy and Interior Departments — with Energy naturally focused on what’s especially important for energy infrastructure. Getting consistency between the lists, which are only a few years old, will “increase transparency within our federal agencies, ensuring all of our nation’s critical resources are developed, traded, and produced equally, and strengthen our supply chains,” Mike Lee (R-Ut), a sponsor of the Senate version of the legislation, said in a statement.
Trump’s executive order asking for the investigation sought to speed up permitting for new mines — and they’ll need all the help they can get. S&P calculates that the average copper mine takes over 30 years to develop. Rio Tinto and BHP’s Resolution Copper project in Superior, Arizona — which the companies hope will produce 20 million tons of copper — has already sucked up some $2 billion of capital while producing zero copper after about 20 years of legal and political opposition. A proposed copper-nickel mine in Minnesota has alreadyabsorbed around $1 billion worth of investment and is still wrangling over the more than 20 permits it needs.
But for the Trump administration’s strategy of tariffs and expedited permitting to actually work for American copper end users, it will have to lead to an expansion of smelting and recycling, in addition to mining.
Reuters reported last year that the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Mexico would re-open an Arizona smelter, but that has yet to happen (it’s currently a Superfund site). A copper mine in Milford, Utah said last week that it was expanding to meet rising copper demand.
The smelting sector is dominated by China. “The United States has ample copper reserves, yet our smelting and refining capacity lags significantly behind global competitors,” the White House said in its copper executive order in February. China’s dominance, “coupled with global overcapacity and a single producer’s control of world supply chains, poses a direct threat to United States national security and economic stability.”
The United States produces around 1.2 million tons of copper annually from its mines and imports around 900,000 tons, according to the United States Geological Survey. Some of that domestically mined copper — around 375,000 tons worth — ends up being exported for smelting, according to the Copper Development Association.
While the United States is near the top of national copper production (well behind the world leader, Chile, but comparable to other large-scale copper producers such as Indonesia and Australia), it has a meager copper refining industry, with only two active smelters producing around 400,000 tons of copper a year — a fraction of China’s refining capacity — leaving American industry reliant on imports.
The energy industry has been dealing with the copper issue for years. More specifically, it’s worrying about how domestic and global production will be able to keep up with what forecasters anticipate could be massive demand.
That goes not just for copper — it also includes the metals that are mined alongside it. First Solar, the U.S.-based solar manufacturing company, has benefited from tariffs on solar panels put in place during the Biden administration. But while First Solar has been a winner in the renewable energy trade conflict, it is still sensitive to the global trade in commodities. That’s in part because it is also a major consumer of tellurium, a mineral that’s a byproduct of copper mining, and which was the subject of expanded export Chinese export controls announced early last month.
“We have, over the past decade employed a strategic sourcing strategy to diversify our tellurium supply chain to mitigate a sole sourcing position in China and are undertaking additional measures to mitigate dependencies on China for certain products containing to tellurium,” Alexander Bradley, First Solar’s chief financial officer, said in the company’s February earnings call. “While we continue to evaluate [whether] there will be any operational impact from China's decision, this latest development emphasizes the urgent need for the United States to accelerate the strategic development of copper mining and processing of its byproduct materials, including tellurium.”
Electric vehicles are another major user of copper among climate technologies, with EVs having on average around 180 pounds of copper in them, according to the Copper Development Association. Tesla — which will soon be hit by auto tariffs — has been actively trying to reduce its copper consumption. Meanwhile Rivian, one of Tesla’s primary domestic competitors, announced last year that it would cut its production targets dramatically due to what turned out to be a supplier communication snafu for a copper component of its motors.
“We’re very bullish on copper prices,” Kathleen Quirk, chief executive officer of Freeport-McMoRan, which runs a number of U.S. copper mines (and a smelter, to boot), said at a financial conference in February. With boosts in demand coming from “power generation, new power generation investments, multibillion-dollar investments in infrastructure and energy infrastructure, it's going to be very positive for copper.”
Copper prices paid by American manufacturers have been rising for the past five months, according to the monthly PMI survey. Prices in New York reached record highs last week, hitting almost $12,000 per ton as the industry tried to beat the almost-certainly-inevitable tariffs, according to an ING analyst report released last week.
The actual imposition of the tariffs would constitute a “further upside risk to copper prices” — in other words, prices will continue to climb, according to the ING analysts. “The U.S. copper rush could leave the rest of the world tight on copper if demand picks up more quickly than expected,” the ING analysts wrote.
Copper futures have shot up this year by around 25%, leading to profits for those who mine it — especially in the United States.
From the perspective of Freeport-McMoRan, the market gyrations so far have generally been to the upside, with the premium on copper in the U.S. “helping us from that perspective of generating higher revenues for our U.S. price copper,” Quirk said at the conference. But the domestic copper industry as a whole does not see tariffs as the sole way to increase copper production.
“The U.S. will need an all-of-the-above sourcing strategy to secure a stable supply for domestic use. This must include increased mining in the U.S., increased smelting and refining in the U.S., enhanced recycling, keeping more copper scrap within U.S. borders, and continued trade with reliable partners to maintain the flow of critical raw material feedstocks for domestic use,” Copper Development Association chief executive Adam Estelle told me in an emailed statement.
And tariffs can come in faster than new mines and smelters can be built or their capacity expanded. American mining projects have been mired in decades of permitting delays and negotiations with local communities not because there isn’t a market opportunity for new copper, but because it just takes a very long time to open a mine.
Even as she was celebrating Freeport-McMoRan’s robust outlook, CEO Kathleen Quirk noted that “at the same time, it's become more and more difficult to develop new supplies of copper.”
That goes especially for industries related to renewable energy, where copper finds itself into grid equipment, solar panels, and wind turbines. Even so, they’ve been wary of talking about an impending tariff directly.
A number of trade groups, including the Zero Emission Transportation Association, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, and the Solar Energy Industries Association, hailed an executive order aiming to accelerate critical minerals production released March 20. When I asked about copper tariffs, however, a ZETA spokesperson referred me to an earlier statement decrying trade conflict with Canada and Mexico, saying that “imposing tariffs on allies and trading partners like Canada and Mexico — both of which play a significant role in the North American automotive supply chain — will increase costs to consumers and make it more difficult to attract investment into our communities.”
Meanwhile, NEMA’s vice president of public affairs, Spencer Pederson, told me in an emailed statement that “any new trade policies must provide predictability and certainty for future domestic investments and businesses.”
Other manufacturing-centric industries that use copper aren’t thrilled about the prospect of tariffs, either. A spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers referred me to its recent survey showing that the top two concerns among its members were “trade uncertainties,” feared by more than three quarters of respondents, and “increased raw material costs,” which worried 60% of respondents. While NAM is broadly supportive of many Trump administration goals, especially around extending the 2017 tax cuts, it has called for a “commonsense manufacturing strategy” which includes “making way for exemptions for critical inputs.” That runs against the Trump administration’s preference for big, obvious tariffs.
Tristan Abbey would come to Washington from a Texas think tank that argues peak oil is way off base.
Donald Trump’s pick to run the Energy Information Administration works for a think tank that denies the existence of an energy transition.
The Energy Information Administration is the nation’s primary energy fuel and power forecasting agency. Since its inception in 1977, EIA has become a go-to source of data for many U.S. businesses, analysts, and policymakers alike. The agency’s previous administrators have been relatively apolitical academics and industry experts, including under the first Trump administration, whose EIA administrator came to the role from a faculty position at Rice University. The office’s current acting administrator is Stephen Nalley, who was appointed deputy administrator by Trump in 2018 after serving in various other roles at the agency.
Last month, however, the president quietly nominated a new EIA administrator who may represent a new direction for the agency. Tristan Abbey is an energy consultant and a senior fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics, a think tank founded last year by a conservative policy outfit, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The group argues against the concept of “peak oil,” the notion that the world will one day hit a maximum level of oil demand as it transitions to other (presumably more climate-friendly) fuels.
“There has never been a more critical time for sober-minded, fact-based, emotion-free perspectives in energy domains,” the think tank proudly declares on its About webpage. “The U.S. and European governments, along with many U.S. states, are embarking on the biggest industrial spending program in history, all directed in the pursuit of an ‘energy transition’ with the goal to rapidly replace hydrocarbons that currently supply 80% of the world’s energy. Why are the stakes so high? ‘Transitions’ of such scale have never occurred. And energy is fundamental to everything in civilization.”
Abbey was previously director of energy and environment at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019 under Trump 1.0, and was also chief economist for the GOP on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, boasting in a CV that his role included successfully repealing a federal oil export ban. Per that CV, he previously worked for Clarium Capital Management and Founders Fund, two hedge funds founded by GOP financier Peter Thiel. Abbey was also on the Trump 1.0 transition team, according to his LinkedIn.
Today, Abbey also works with the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a D.C. petroleum research organization, and recently stepped away from working at the Trump-affiliated America First Policy Institute, according to an ethics disclosure posted online.
Abbey’s work at the NCEA provides insight into the views he may bring to the top of EIA.
His biggest achievement at the think tank was authoring a report declaring that global gas demand will remain strong. “[T]he broad directional arrows are distinguishable: for the foreseeable future, the world will need far more electricity and more industrial energy, and a significant portion of that will require natural gas,” the report said. “The federal government never decided to become the world’s largest LNG exporter, but it did allow private companies to make that happen. The decision that it can make today is to preserve that achievement.”
On a webinar about the report, Abbey called on the U.S. to take steps to increase domestic natural gas consumption and find new ways to use LNG in various consumer products and industrial processes. “Is there something that is holding U.S. industry back from using more natural gas than it would otherwise?,” he asked.
The NCEA is a key player in a highly consequential but wonky debate in Washington about whether the U.S. should try and put thumb screws onto the International Energy Agency, a world power and fuel forecasting body overseen by the OECD, an international body to which the U.S. is the single largest contributor.
The IEA has previously predicted “peak oil” may occur before 2030 — one of many predictions that have led some Republicans in Washington to declare the IEA is no longer impartial and a “cheerleader” for renewable energy. These Republicans have been led by Senator John Barrasso, one of the lawmakers who will oversee Abbey’s nomination. Another fan of this view is Kathleen Sgamma, Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Land Management, who cited the NCEA to call on U.S. policymakers to pressure the IEA into “meaningful reform” of its forecasting about the energy transition. The op-ed was first reported by E&E News’ Scott Waldman.
How does Abbey feel about the war on the IEA? We’ll find out at his confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled. We’ve asked Republicans on the committee for an update on when that’ll happen and we will let you know once we find out. Given they’re still working through other more high-profile nominees, that’ll take a while.