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From what it means for America’s climate goals to how it might make American cars smaller again
The Biden administration just kicked off the next phase of the electric-vehicle revolution.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled Wednesday some of the world’s most aggressive climate rules on the transportation sector, a sweeping effort that aims to ensure that two-thirds of new cars, SUVs, and pickups — and one-quarter of new heavy-duty trucks — sold in the United States in 2032 will be all electric.
The rules, which are the most ambitious attempt to regulate greenhouse-gas pollution in American history, would put the country at the forefront of the global transition to electric vehicles. If adopted and enforced as proposed, the new standards could eventually prevent 10 billion tons of carbon pollution, roughly double America’s total annual emissions last year, the EPA says.
The rules would roughly halve carbon pollution from America’s massive car and truck fleet, the world’s third largest, within a decade. Such a cut is in line with Biden’s Paris Agreement goal of cutting carbon pollution from across the economy in half by 2030.
Transportation generates more carbon pollution than any other part of the U.S. economy. America’s hundreds of millions of cars, SUVs, pickups, 18-wheelers, and other vehicles generated roughly 25% of total U.S. carbon emissions last year, a figure roughly equal to the entire power sector’s.
In short, the proposal is a big deal with many implications. Here are seven of them.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Every country around the world must cut its emissions in half by 2030 in order for the world to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That goal, enshrined in the Paris Agreement, is a widely used benchmark for the arrival of climate change’s worst impacts — deadly heat waves, stronger storms, and a near total die-off of coral reefs.
The new proposal would bring America’s cars and trucks roughly in line with that requirement. According to an EPA estimate, the vehicle fleet’s net carbon emissions would be 46% lower in 2032 than they stand today.
That means that rules of this ambition and stringency are a necessary part of meeting America’s goals under the Paris Agreement. The United States has pledged to halve its carbon emissions, as compared to its all-time high, by 2020. The country is not on track to meet that goal today, but robust federal, state, and corporate action — including strict vehicle rules — could help it get there, a recent report from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, found.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Until this week, California and the European Union had been leading the world’s transition to electric vehicles. Both jurisdictions have pledged to ban sales of new fossil-fuel-powered cars after 2035 and set aggressive targets to meet that goal — although Europe recently watered down its commitment by allowing some cars to burn synthetic fuels.
The United States hasn’t issued a similar ban. But under the new rules, its timeline for adopting EVs will come close to both jurisdictions — although it may slightly lag California’s. By 2030, EVs will make up about 58% of new vehicles sold in Europe, according to the think tank Transportation & Environment; that is roughly in line with the EPA’s goals.
California, meanwhile, expects two-thirds of new car sales to be EVs by the same year, putting it ahead of the EPA’s proposal. The difference between California’s targets and the EPA’s may come down to technical accounting differences, however. The Washington Post has reported that the new EPA rules are meant to harmonize the national standards with California’s.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
With or without the rules, the United States was already likely to see far more EVs in the future. Ford has said that it would aim for half of its global sales to be electric by 2030, and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler and Jeep, announced that half of its American sales and all its European sales must be all-electric by that same date. General Motors has pledged to sell only EVs after 2035. In fact, the EPA expects that automakers are collectively on track for 44% of vehicle sales to be electric by 2030 without any changes to emissions rules.
But every manufacturer is on a different timeline, and some weren’t planning to move quite this quickly. John Bozella, the president of Alliance for Automotive Innovation, has struck a skeptical note about the proposal. “Remember this: A lot has to go right for this massive — and unprecedented — change in our automotive market and industrial base to succeed,” he told The New York Times.
The proposed rules would unify the industry and push it a bit further than current plans suggest.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
The EPA’s proposal would see sales of all-electric heavy trucks grow beginning with model year 2027. The agency estimates that by 2032, some 50% of “vocational” vehicles sold — like delivery trucks, garbage trucks, and cement mixers — will be zero-emissions, as well as 35% of short-haul tractors and 25% of long-haul tractor trailers. This would save about 1.8 billion tons of CO2 through 2055 — roughly equivalent to one year’s worth of emissions from the transportation sector.
But the proposal falls short of where the market is already headed, some environmental groups pointed out. “It’s not driving manufacturers to do anything,” said Paul Cort, director of Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign. “It’s following what’s happening in the market in a very conservative way.”
Last year, California passed rules requiring 60% of vocational truck sales and 40% of tractors to be zero-emissions by 2032. Daimler, the world’s largest truck manufacturer, has said that zero emissions trucks would make up 60% of its truck sales by 2030 and 100% by 2039. Volvo Trucks, another major player, said it aims for 50% of its vehicle deliveries to be electric by 2030.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
One of the more interesting aspects of the new rules is that they pick up on a controversy that has been running on and off for the past 13 years.
In 2010, the Obama administration issued the first-ever greenhouse-gas regulations for light-duty cars, SUVs, and trucks. In order to avoid a Supreme Court challenge to the rules, the White House did something unprecedented: It got every automaker to agree to meet the standards even before they became law.
This was a milestone in the history of American environmental law. Because the automakers agreed to the rules, they were in effect conceding that the EPA had the legal authority to regulate their greenhouse-gas pollution in the first place. That shored up the EPA’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gases from any part of the economy, allowing the agency to move on to limiting carbon pollution from power plants and factories.
But that acquiescence came at a cost. The Obama administration agreed to what are called “vehicle footprint” provisions, which put its rules on a sliding scale based on vehicle size. Essentially, these footprint provisions said that a larger vehicle — such as a three-row SUV or full-sized pickup — did not have to meet the same standards as a compact sedan. What’s more, an automaker only had to meet the standards that matched the footprint of the cars it actually sold. In other words, a company that sold only SUVs and pickups would face lower overall requirements than one that also sold sedans, coupes, and station wagons.
Some of this decision was out of Obama’s hands: Congress had required that the Department of Transportation, which issues a similar set of rules, consider vehicle footprint in laws that passed in 2007 and 1975. Those same laws also created the regulatory divide between cars and trucks.
But over the past decade, SUV and truck sales have boomed in the United States, while the market for old-fashioned cars has withered. In 2019, SUVs outsold cars two to one; big SUVs and trucks of every type now make up nearly half the new car market. In the past decade, too, the crossover — a new type of car-like vehicle that resembles a light-duty truck — has come to dominate the American road. This has had repercussions not just for emissions, but pedestrian fatalities as well.
Researchers have argued that the footprint rules may be at least partially to blame for this trend. In 2018, economists at the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley argued Japan’s tailpipe rules, which also include a footprint mechanism, pushed automakers to super-size their cars. Modeling studies have reached the same conclusion about the American rules.
For the first time, the EPA’s proposal seems to recognize this criticism and tries to address it. The new rules make the greenhouse-gas requirements for cars and trucks more similar than they have been in the past, so as to not “inadvertently provide an incentive for manufacturers to change the size or regulatory class of vehicles as a compliance strategy,” the EPA says in a regulatory filing.
The new rules also tighten requirements on big cars and trucks so that automakers can’t simply meet the rules by enlarging their vehicles.
These changes may not reverse the trend toward larger cars. It might even reveal how much cars’ recent growth is driven by consumer taste: SUVs’ share of the new car market has been growing almost without exception since the Ford Explorer debuted in 1991. But it marks the first admission by the agency that in trying to secure a climate win, it may have accidentally created a monster.
Heatmap Illustration/Buenavista Images via Getty Images
The EPA is trumpeting the energy security benefits of the proposal, in addition to its climate benefits.
While the U.S. is a net exporter of crude — and that’s not expected to change in the coming decades — U.S. refineries still rely on “significant imports of heavy crude which could be subject to supply disruptions,” the agency notes. This reliance ties the U.S. to authoritarian regimes around the world and also exposes American consumers to wilder swings in gas prices.
But the new greenhouse gas rules are expected to severely diminish the country’s dependence on foreign oil. Between cars and trucks, the rules would cut crude oil imports by 124 million barrels per year by 2030, and 1 billion barrels in 2050. For context, the United States imported about 2.2 billion barrels of crude oil in 2021.
This would also be a turning point for gas stations. Americans consumed about 135 billion gallons of gasoline in 2022. The rules would cut into gas sales by about 6.5 billion gallons by 2030, and by more than 50 billion gallons by 2050. Gas stations are going to have to adapt or fade away.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Although it may seem like these new electric vehicles could tax our aging, stressed electricity grid, the EPA claims these rules won’t change the status quo very much. The agency estimates the rules would require a small, 0.4% increase in electricity generation to meet new EV demand by 2030 compared to business as usual, with generation needs increasing by 4% by 2050. “The expected increase in electric power demand attributable to vehicle electrification is not expected to adversely affect grid reliability,” the EPA wrote.
Still, that’s compared to the trajectory we’re already on. With or without these rules, we’ll need a lot of investment in new power generation and reliability improvements in the coming years to handle an electrifying economy. “Standards or no standards, we have to have grid operators preparing for EVs,” said Samantha Houston, a senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from replacing gas cars will also far outweigh any emissions related to increased power demands. The EPA estimates that between now and 2055, the rules could drive up power plant pollution by 710 million metric tons, but will cut emissions from cars by 8 billion tons.
This article was last updated on April 13 at 12:37 PM ET.
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On the IEA’s latest report, flooding in LA, and Bill Gates’ bad news
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms tomorrow could spawn tornadoes in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama • A massive wildfire on a biodiverse island in the Indian Ocean has been burning for nearly a month, threatening wildlife • Tropical Cyclone Zelia has made landfall in Western Australia with winds up to 180mph.
Bill Gates’ climate tech advocacy organization has told its partners that it will slash its grantmaking budget this year, dealing a blow to climate-focused policy and advocacy groups that relied on the Microsoft founder, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has learned. Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization for Gates’ various climate-focused programs, alerted many nonprofit grantees earlier this month that it would not be renewing its support for them. This pullback will not affect Breakthrough’s $3.5 billion climate-focused venture capital arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds an extensive portfolio of climate tech companies. Breakthrough’s fellowship program, which provides early-stage climate tech leaders with funding and assistance, will also remain intact, a spokesperson confirmed. They would not comment on whether this change will lead to layoffs at Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough Energy made up a relatively small share — perhaps 1% — of climate philanthropy worldwide,” Brigham writes. “But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.”
Anti-wind activists have joined with well-connected figures in conservative legal and energy circles to privately lobby the Trump administration to undo permitting decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to documents obtained by Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. Representatives of conservative think tanks and legal nonprofits — including the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dated February 11 requesting that the Trump administration “immediately revoke” letters from NOAA to 11 offshore wind projects authorizing “incidental takes,” a term of regulatory art referencing accidental and permissible deaths under federal endangered species and mammal protection laws. The letter also requested “an immediate cession of construction” at four offshore wind projects with federal approvals that have begun construction: Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Wind 1, and Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.
“This letter represents a new stage of Trump’s war on offshore wind,” Holzman writes. “Yes, he has frozen leasing, along with most permitting activity and even public meetings related to pending projects. But the president's executive order targeting offshore wind opened the door to rescinding leases and previous permits. Doing so would produce new, costly legal battles for developers and for publicly-regulated utilities, ratepayers. Over the past few weeks, offshore wind developers with projects that got their permits under Biden have sought to reassure investors that at least they’ll be fine. If this new request is heeded, that calm will subside.”
Heavy downpours triggered flooding and debris flows across Los Angeles County yesterday. A portion of the Pacific Coast Highway, one of the most iconic roadways in America, is closed indefinitely due to mudslides near Malibu, an area devastated in last month’s fires. Duke’s Malibu, a famous oceanfront restaurant along the PCH, was inundated. The worst of the rain has passed now and many flood alerts have been canceled, but the cleanup has just begun.
Rain flows down a street outside a burned home.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Global electricity use is set to rise by 4% annually through 2027, “the equivalent of adding an amount greater than Japan’s annual electricity consumption every year,” according to the International Energy Agency’s new Electricity 2025 report. Here are some key points:
IEA
JPMorgan Chase clients have apparently been demanding more guidance about the climate crisis. As a result, the bank launched a new climate report authored by its global head of climate advisory, Sarah Kapnick, an atmospheric and oceanic scientist who was previously chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report seeks to build what Kapnick is calling “climate intuition” – the ability to use science to assess and make strategic investment decisions about the shifting climate. “Success in the New Climate Era hinges on our ability to integrate climate considerations into daily decision-making,” Kapnick writes. “Those who adapt will lead, while others risk falling behind.” Here’s a snippet from the report, to give you a sense of the tone and takeaways:
“Adhering to temperatures below 1.5C will require emissions reductions. Depending on your definition of 1.5C, they may require historic annual reductions and potentially carbon removal. Conversely, if you have a technical or financial view that carbon dioxide removal will not scale, you should assume there is a difficult path to 1.5C (i.e. emissions reductions to zero depending on your definition in 6, 15, or 30+ years). If that is the case, you need to plan for the physical manifestations of climate change and social responses that will ensue if your investment horizons are longer.”
Greenhouse gas leaks from supermarket refrigerators are estimated to create as much pollution each year as burning more than 30 million tons of coal.
Grantees told Heatmap they were informed that Bill Gates’ climate funding organization would not renew its support.
Bill Gates’ climate tech advocacy organization has told its partners that it will slash its grantmaking budget this year, dealing a blow to climate-focused policy and advocacy groups that relied on the Microsoft founder, Heatmap has learned.
Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization for Gates’ various climate-focused programs, alerted many nonprofit grantees earlier this month that it would not be renewing its support for them. This pullback will not affect Breakthrough’s $3.5 billion climate-focused venture capital arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds an extensive portfolio of climate tech companies. Breakthrough’s fellowship program, which provides early-stage climate tech leaders with funding and assistance, will also remain intact, a spokesperson confirmed. They would not comment on whether this change will lead to layoffs at Breakthrough Energy.
“Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain as committed as ever to using our voice and resources to advocate for the energy innovations needed to address climate change,” the Breakthrough spokesperson told me in a written statement. “We continue to believe that innovation in energy is essential for achieving global climate goals and securing a prosperous, sustainable world for future generations.”
Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to help develop and deploy technologies that would help the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The organization made more than $96 million in grants in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.
Among its beneficiaries was the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based think tank that promotes technological solutions to climate change. (Despite having a similar name, it is not affiliatedwith Breakthrough Energy.) Last week, a representative from Breakthrough Energy told the institute’s executive director, Ted Nordhaus, that its funding would not be renewed. The Breakthrough Institute had previously received a two-year grant of about $1.2 million per year, which wrapped up this month.
“What we were told is that they are ceasing all of their climate grantmaking — zeroed out immediately after the USAID shutdown because Bill wants to refocus all of his grantmaking efforts on global health,” Nordhaus told me on Monday, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to defund the United States Agency for International Development. “But it’s very clear that this wasn’t brought on solely by USAID. I had heard from several people that there was a big reassessment going on for a couple of months.”
The Breakthrough spokesperson disputed this characterization, and denied that cutbacks were due to the USAID shutdown or a shift in funding from climate to global health initiatives. The spokesperson also told me that some grantmaking budget remains, though they would not reveal how much.
As for Breakthrough Institute, the funding cut will primarily impact its agricultural program, which received about 90% of its budget from Breakthrough Energy. Nordhaus is trying to figure out how to keep that program afloat, while the institute’s other three areas of policy focus — energy and climate, nuclear innovation, and energy and development — remain largely unaffected.
Multiple other organizations confirmed to Heatmap that they also will not receive future grants from Breakthrough Energy. A representative for the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment, a trade organization for sustainability professionals, told me that Breakthrough had recently informed the group that it would not renew a $400,000 grant, which is set to wrap up this May. (ACLCA’s spokesperson also noted that the grant had not come with any indication that it would be renewed.) Another former grantee told me that while their organization is currently wrapping up a grant with Breakthrough and does not have anything in the works with them for this year, they expected that future funding would be impacted, though they did not explain why.
Breakthrough Energy made up a relatively small share — perhaps 1% — of climate philanthropy worldwide. Foundations and individuals around the world gave a total of $9 billion to $15 billion to climate causes in 2023, according to an analysis from the Climateworks Foundation.
But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.
“Their presence will be missed,” said the CEO of another climate nonprofit who was notified by Breakthrough that its funding would not be renewed. Breakthrough Energy “was one of the few funders supporting pragmatic research and advocacy work that pushed at neglected areas such as the need for zero-carbon firm power and accelerated energy innovation,” they added.
"Even if it’s a drop in the bucket, it still makes a difference,” another former grantee with a particularly large budget told me. This organization recently sent Breakthrough an inquiry about partnering up again and is waiting to hear back. “But for small organizations, it’s make it or break it.”
Speculation abounds as to the rationale behind Breakthrough’s funding cuts. “I have heard that one of the reasons that Bill decided to stop funding climate was that he concluded that there was so much money in climate that his money really wasn’t that important,” Nordhaus told me. But that is not true when it comes to agriculture, he said, which comprises about 12% of global emissions. ”There’s very little money for advocating for agriculture innovation to address the climate impacts of the ag sector,” Nordhaus told me.
Gates, who privately donated to a nonprofit affiliated with the Harris campaign in 2024 but did not endorse the Democrat, dined with Trump and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, for more than three hours at Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Day, he told Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker. He said that Trump was interested in the possibility of eradicating polio or developing an HIV vaccine. “I felt like he was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation,” he told her, days before the inauguration.
Since then, Trump’s war on USAID has frozen funding to a polio eradication program and shut down the phase 1 clinical trial of an HIV vaccine in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda.
The Trump administration is now being lobbied to nix offshore wind projects already under construction.
Anti-wind activists have joined with well-connected figures in conservative legal and energy circles to privately lobby the Trump administration to undo permitting decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to documents obtained by Heatmap.
Representatives of conservative think tanks and legal nonprofits — including the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dated February 11 requesting that the Trump administration “immediately revoke” letters from NOAA to 11 offshore wind projects authorizing “incidental takes,” a term of regulatory art referencing accidental and permissible deaths under federal endangered species and mammal protection laws. The letter lays out a number of perceived issues with how those approvals have historically been issued for offshore wind companies and claims the government has improperly analyzed the cumulative effects of adding offshore wind to the ocean’s existing industrialization. NOAA oversees marine species protection.
The letter also requested “an immediate cession of construction” at four offshore wind projects with federal approvals that have begun construction: Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Wind 1, and Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.
“It is with a sense of real urgency we write you today,” the letter states, referencing Trump’s executive order targeting the offshore wind industry to ask that he go further. “[E]leven projects have already received approvals with four of those under construction. Leasing and permitting will be reviewed for these approved projects but may take time.”
I obtained the letter from Paul Kamenar, a longtime attorney in conservative legal circles currently with the D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, who told me the letter had been sent to the department this week. Kamenar is one of multiple attorneys involved in a lawsuit filed last year by Heartland and CFACT challenging permits for Dominion’s Coastal Virginia project over alleged potential impacts to the endangered North Atlantic right whale. We reported earlier this week that the government signaled in proceedings for that case it will review approvals for Coastal Virginia, the first indication that previous permits issued for offshore wind could be vulnerable to the Trump effect.
Kamenar described the request to Burgum as “a coalition letter,” and told me that “the new secretary there is sympathetic” to their complaints about offshore wind permits. “We’re hoping that this letter will basically reverse the letter[s] of authorizations, or have the agency go back,” Kamenar said, adding a message for Dominion and other developers implicated by the letter: “Just because the company has the approval doesn’t mean it’s all systems go.”
The Interior Department does not directly oversee NOAA – that’s the Commerce Department. But it does control the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which ultimately regulates all offshore wind development and issues final approvals.
Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.
Some signees of the document are part of a constellation of influential figures in the anti-renewables movement whose voices have been magnified in the new administration.
One of the letter’s two lead signatories is David Stevenson, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute, an organization involved in legal battles against offshore wind projects under development in the Mid-Atlantic. The Institute says on its website it is a member of the State Policy Network, a broad constellation of think tanks, legal advocacy groups, and nonprofits.
Multiple activists who signed onto the letter work with the Save Right Whales Coalition, a network of local organizations and activists. Coalition members have appeared with Republican lawmakers at field hearings and rallies over the past few years attacking offshore wind. They became especially influential in GOP politics after being featured in a film by outspoken renewables critic and famous liberal-turned-conservative Michael Shellenberger, who is himself involved in the Coalition. His film, Thrown to the Wind, blew up in right-wing media circles because it claimed to correlate whale deaths with offshore wind development.
When asked if the Coalition was formally involved in this request of the administration, Lisa Linowes, a co-founder of the Coalition, replied in an email: “The Coalition was not a signer of the request.”
One cosigner sure to turn heads: John Droz, a pioneer in the anti-wind activist movement who for years has given talks and offered roadmaps on how best to stop renewables projects.
The letter also includes an endorsement from Mandy Davis, who was involved with the draft anti-wind executive order we told you was sent to the Trump transition team before inauguration. CFACT also co-signed that draft order when it was transmitted to the transition team, according to correspondence reviewed by Heatmap.
Most of the signatories to the letter list their locations. Many of the individuals unrelated to bigger organizations list their locations as in Delaware or Maryland. Only a few signatories on the letter have locations in other states dealing with offshore wind projects.
On its face, this letter represents a new stage of Trump’s war on offshore wind.
Yes, he has frozen leasing, along with most permitting activity and even public meetings related to pending projects. But the president’s executive order targeting offshore wind opened the door to rescinding leases and previous permits. Doing so would produce new, costly legal battles for developers and for publicly-regulated utilities, ratepayers. Over the past few weeks, offshore wind developers with projects that got their permits under Biden have sought to reassure investors that at least they’ll be fine.
If this new request is heeded, that calm will subside.
Beyond that, reversing these authorizations could represent a scandal for scientific integrity at NOAA – or at least NOAA’s Fisheries division, the National Marine Fisheries Service. Heeding the letter’s requests would mean revisiting the findings of career scientists for what developers may argue are purely political reasons, or at minimum arbitrary ones.
This wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened under Trump. In 2020, I used public records to prove that plans by career NOAA Fisheries employees to protect endangered whales from oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic were watered down after a political review. At the time, Democratic Representative Jared Huffman — now the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee — told me that my reporting was evidence of potential scientific integrity issues at NOAA and represented “blatant scientific and environmental malpractice at the highest order.”
It’s worth emphasizing how much this mattered, not just for science but literally in court, as the decision to allow more seismic testing for oil under Trump was challenged at the time on the grounds that it was made arbitrarily.
Peter Corkeron, a former NOAA scientist with expertise researching the North Atlantic right whale, reviewed the letter to Burgum and told me in an email that essentially, the anti-offshore wind movement is exploiting similar arguments made by conservationists about issues with the federal government’s protection of the species to target this sector. The federal regulator has for many years faced the ire of conservation activists, who’ve said it does not go far enough to protect endangered species from more longstanding threats like fishing and vessel strikes.
If NOAA were to bow to this request, Corkeron wrote, he would interpret that as the agency’s failure to fully protect the species in good faith instead becoming “suborned by the hydrocarbon exploitation industry as a way of eliminating a competing form of energy production that should, in time, prove more beneficial for whales than what we’re currently doing.”
“The point on cumulative impacts is, on face value, fair,” he said. “The problem is its lack of context. Cumulative impacts on North Atlantic right whales from offshore wind are possible. However, in the context of the cumulative impacts of the shipping (vessel strike kills, noise pollution), and fishing (death, maiming, failure to breed) industries, they’ll be insignificant. Because NOAA has never clearly set out to address ways to offset other impacts while developing the offshore wind industry, these additive impacts place a burden on this new industry in ways that existing, and more damaging, industries don’t have to address.”
CFACT responded to a request for comment by sending me a press release with the letter attached that was not publicly available, and did not respond to the climate criticisms by press time. David Stevenson of the Caesar Rodney Institute sent me a statement criticizing offshore wind energy and questioning its ability to “lower global emissions.”
“The goal is to pause construction until everything is reviewed,” Stevenson said. When asked if there was an outcome where a review led to projects being built, he said no, calling offshore wind an “environmental wrecking ball.”
Well, we’ll soon find out what the real wrecking ball is.