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On offshore wind wins, China’s ‘strong energy nation,’ and Japan’s deep-sea mining
The Central American country is the now the Americas’ EV leader.
On Vineyard Wind’s win, Hydro-Quebec, and the EU-India trade deal
Current conditions: Temperatures as low as 30 degrees Fahrenheit below average are expected to persist for at least another week throughout the Northeast, including in New York City • Midsummer heat is driving temperatures up near 100 degrees in Paraguay • Antarctica is facing intense katabatic winds that pull cold air from high altitudes to lower ones.
President Donald Trump, no fan of the Paris Agreement.Tom Brenner/Getty Images
The United States has, once again, exited the Paris Agreement, the first global carbon-cutting pact to include the world’s two top emitters. President Donald Trump initiated the withdrawal on his first day back in office last year — unlike the last time Trump quit the Paris accords, after a prolonged will-he-won’t-he game in 2017. That process took three years to complete, allowing newly installed President Joe Biden to rejoin in 2021 after just a brief lapse. This time, the process took only a year to wrap up, meaning the U.S. will remain outside the pact for years at least. “Trump is making unilateral decisions to remove the United States from any meaningful global climate action,” Katie Harris, the vice president of federal affairs at the union-affiliated BlueGreen Alliance, said in a statement. “His personal vendetta against clean energy and climate action will hurt workers and our environment.” Now, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, at “all Paris-related meetings (which comprise much of the conference), the U.S. would have to attend as an ‘observer’ with no decision-making power, the same category as lobbyists.”
America has not yet completed its withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overarching group through which the Paris Agreement was negotiated, which Trump initiated this month. That won’t be final until next year. That Trump is even planning to quit the body shows how much more aggressive the administration’s approach to climate policy is this time around. Trump remained within the UNFCCC during his first term, preferring to stay engaged in negotiations even after quitting the Paris Agreement.
Just weeks after a federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s stop work order on the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island’s shores, another federal judge has overturned the order halting construction on the Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts. That, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote last night, “makes four offshore wind farms that have now won preliminary injunctions against Trump’s freeze on the industry.” Besides Revolution Wind, Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project and Equinor’s Empire Wind plant off Long Island have each prevailed in their challenges to the administration’s blanket order to abandon construction on dubious national security grounds.
Meanwhile, the White House is potentially starving another major infrastructure project of funding. The Gateway rail project to build a new tunnel under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York City could run out of money and halt construction by the end of next week, the project manager warned Tuesday. Washington had promised billions to get the project done, but the money stopped flowing in October during the government shutdown. Officials at the Department of Transportation said the funding would remain suspended until, as The New York Times reported, the project’s contracts could be reviewed for compliance with new rules about businesses owned by women and minorities.
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A new transmission line connecting New England’s power-starved and gas-addicted grid to Quebec’s carbon-free hydroelectric system just came online this month. But electricity abruptly stopped flowing onto the New England Clean Energy Connect as the Canadian province’s state-owned utility, Hydro-Quebec, withheld power to meet skyrocketing demand at home amid the Arctic chill. Power plant owners in New England and New York, where Hydro-Quebec is building another line down the Hudson River to connect to New York City, complained that deals with the utility focused on maintaining supplies during the summer, when air conditioning traditionally surges power to peak demand. Hydro-Quebec restored power to the line on Monday.
The storm represented a force majeure event. If it hadn’t, the utility would have needed to pay penalties. But the incident is sure to fuel more criticism from power plant owners, most of which are fossil fueled, who oppose increased competition from the Quebecois. “I hate to say it, but a lot of the issues and concerns that we have been talking about for years have played out this weekend,” Dan Dolan — who leads the New England Power Generators Association, a trade group representing power plant owners — told E&E News. “This is a very expensive contract for a product that predominantly comes in non-stressed periods in the winter,” he said.
Europe has signed what the European Commission president Urusula von der Leyen called “the mother of all deals” with India, “a free trade zone of 2 billion people.” As part of the deal, the world’s second-largest market and the most populous nation plan to ramp up exports of steel, plastics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. But don’t expect Brussels to give New Delhi a break on its growing share of the global emissions. The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism — the first major tariff in the world based on the carbon intensity of imports — just took effect this month, and will remain intact for Indian goods, Reuters reported.
The Department of the Interior has ordered staff at the National Park Service to remove or edit signs and other informational materials in at least 17 parks out West to scrub mentions of climate change or hardship inflicted by settlers on Native Americans. The effort comes as part of what The Washington Post called a renewed push to implement Trump’s executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” Park staff have interpreted those orders, the newspaper reported, to mean eliminating any reference to historic racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, and climate change. Just last week, officials removed an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park on George Washington’s ownership of slaves.
Tesla is going trucking. The electric automaker inked a deal Tuesday with Pilot Travel Centers, the nation’s largest operator of highway pit stops, to install Tesla’s Semi Chargers for heavy-duty electric vehicle charging. The stations are set to be built at select Pilot locations along Interstate 5, Interstate 10, and several other major corridors where heavy-duty charging is highest. The first sites are scheduled to open this summer.
Rob talks with McMaster University engineering professor Greig Mordue, then checks in with Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman on the EVs to watch out for.
It’s been a huge few weeks for the electric vehicle industry — at least in North America.
After a major trade deal, Canada is set to import tens of thousands of new electric vehicles from China every year, and it could soon invite a Chinese automaker to build a domestic factory. General Motors has also already killed the Chevrolet Bolt, one of the most anticipated EV releases of 2026.
How big a deal is the China-Canada EV trade deal, really? Will we see BYD and Xiaomi cars in Toronto and Vancouver (and Detroit and Seattle) any time soon — or is the trade deal better for Western brands like Volkswagen or Tesla which have Chinese factories but a Canadian presence? On this week’s Shift Key, Rob talks to Greig Mordue, a former Toyota executive who is now an engineering professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, about how the deal could shake out. Then he chats with Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman about why the Bolt died — and the most exciting EVs we could see in 2026 anyway.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Over the weekend there was a new tariff threat from President Trump — he seems to like to do this on Saturday when there are no futures markets open — a new tariff threat on Canada. It is kind of interesting because he initially said that he thought if Canada could make a deal with China, they should, and he thought that was good. Then over the weekend, he said that it was actually bad that Canada had made some free trade, quote-unquote, deal with China.
Do you think that these tariff threats will affect any Carney actions going forward? Is this already priced in, slash is this exactly why Carney has reached out to China in the first place?
Greig Mordue: I think it all comes under the headline of “deep sigh,” and we’ll see where this goes. But for the first 12 months of the U.S. administration, and the threat of tariffs, and the pullback, and the new threat, and this going forward, the public policy or industrial policy response from the government of Canada and the province of Ontario, where automobiles are built in this country, was to tread lightly. And tread lightly, generally means do nothing, and by doing nothing stop the challenges.
And so doing nothing led to Stellantis shutting down an assembly plant in Brampton, Ontario; General Motors shutting an assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario; General Motors reducing a three-shift operation in Oshawa, Ontario to two shifts; and Ford ragging the puck — Canadian term — on the launch of a new product in their Oakville, Ontario plant. So doing nothing didn’t really help Canada from a public policy perspective.
So they’re moving forward on two fronts: One is the resetting of relationships with China and the hope of some production from Chinese manufacturers. And two, the promise of automotive industrial policy in February, or at some point this spring. So we’ll see where that goes — and that may cause some more restless nights from the U.S. administration. We’ll see.
Mentioned:
Canada’s new "strategic partnership” with China
The Chevy Bolt Is Already Dead. Again.
The EVs Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Heatmap Pro brings all of our research, reporting, and insights down to the local level. The software platform tracks all local opposition to clean energy and data centers, forecasts community sentiment, and guides data-driven engagement campaigns. Book a demo today to see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
