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On modernizing permitting, IRA funds, and a revolt at BP
Current conditions: Central and northeast New Mexico will face “extremely critical fire conditions” over the next two days • Thousands of Iraqis are suffering from respiratory problems caused by a severe sandstorm • Temperatures could hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Balochistan, Pakistan, during a heat wave this week.
On Tuesday, President Trump signed a memorandum ordering the “maximum use of technology in environmental review and permitting process for infrastructure projects of all kinds.” The order also directed the Council on Environmental Quality, which oversees the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, to put together a process for modernizing technology in environmental reviews. Thomas Hochman, the director of infrastructure policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank, celebrated the move by the Trump administration, writing on Twitter “it’s high time to eliminate paper-based reviews, modernize permitting technology (which is often as old as the laws themselves), and experiment with different permitting tools.”
In February, Trump also signed an executive order that gutted CEQ’s authority to oversee NEPA, a move Sierra Club’s senior attorney Nathaniel Shoaff called “rash, unlawful, and unwise.” As my colleague Katie Brigham has written, in theory that order would expedite “projects such as solar farms and clean energy manufacturing facilities; in reality, under the Trump administration, the benefits could redound to fossil fuel infrastructure first and foremost.”
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to immediately lift its freeze on billions of dollars tied to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In her ruling, Judge Mary McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, a Trump appointee, called the pause “arbitrary and capricious,” and added that federal agencies such as the White House’s Office of Management and Budget “do not have unlimited authority to further a president’s agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration.”
The lawsuit was brought by conservation and nonprofit groups that had received grants under the two laws, although McElroy’s order will apply to all frozen IRA and IIJA grants in the country. “Today’s ruling marks a crucial victory for the rule of law and ensures these vital resources will flow to the people and projects Congress intended to support,” Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
A group of BP shareholders, including UK pension provider National Employment Savings Trust and the financial services company Legal & General, announced they will vote in opposition to the re-election of the company’s chairman, Helge Lund, later this week. The move follows BP’s retreat from its goal of dramatically cutting oil and gas production after the company recorded its highest profits ever.
“While it’s disappointing to see BP rowing back on their climate pledges, what’s particularly worrying is they haven’t gone back to shareholders and given us a chance to vote on such a significant decision,” Diandra Soobiah, NEST’s head of responsible investment, told The Guardian last year. L&G, a 1.8% stakeholder in BP, added that it is “deeply concerned” about the retreat toward oil and gas and away from renewables investment. The decision to oppose Lund is, however, “largely symbolic,” Net Zero Investor writes, noting that the chairman has already announced plans to step down next year. BP’s annual general meeting will be held on Thursday.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Tuesday that the EPA is launching a probe into the geoengineering startup Making Sunsets, citing alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. The small South Dakota-based company uses balloons to release sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in order to reflect the sun and offset warming caused by carbon dioxide; it finances the operation by selling credits for each gram of released SO2. Geoengineering — and Making Sunsets more specifically — remain highly controversial, with many environmental experts calling it a “bad idea.” But Daniele Visioni, a climate scientist specializing in aerosols, wrote on Bluesky that while Making Sunsets’ “stunt was silly … I won’t enjoy seeing them attacked by a government that, at the same time, pretends ‘clean coal’ is a thing while pearl-clutching about ‘polluting our air’ with 10 grams of sulfate.”
The United States’ exports of petrochemical feedstocks to China are at risk due to the trade war touched off by President Trump — “yet another example of how Trump’s second term could prove ironically disastrous for the oil and gas industry,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote for Heatmap yesterday. The U.S. exported 83 million barrels of the natural gas product ethane to China in 2024, which the country processes into plastics that are often exported back to the United States. But “U.S. energy flows to China are done unless Beijing and D.C. come to an agreement,” Gregory Brew, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, told Zeitlin. “China is already looking to buy more crude from OPEC states to make up for losing U.S. [imports]” — and natural gas liquids, including ethane, “are sure to follow.”
ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
Humans have observed a colossal squid in its natural habitat for the first time ever. Though science has known about Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni’s existence since discovering arm fragments in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1925, researchers captured the first images of a foot-long juvenile in its home waters nearly 2,000 feet below the surface of the southern Atlantic Ocean.
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.