You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Electric car jobs are a problem around the world.
At the stroke of midnight, employees at three plants owned by General Motors, Ford, and Jeep walked off the job. None of those plants make electric vehicles, unless you count the plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler. But make no mistake — the strike by the United Auto Workers union, its most aggressive labor actions since the 1930s, plays directly into a larger fight over the battery-driven future of the car industry. And that fight has already gone global; you may have just not noticed it yet.
There are a lot of complicated, interwoven issues driving the UAW’s strike, which will start with those three plants but may include more if negotiations deteriorate. First and foremost is pay and benefits at America’s existing UAW plants. Like everyone who’s not fortunate enough to be in the top tax bracket, the UAW’s workers have been stung by inflation and higher costs of living. What was once a well-defined path to middle-class life has been hammered in the last decade as carmaking jobs got sent to Mexico and China. This, after those auto workers made tremendous concessions to keep their employers afloat during the Great Recession and subsequent auto industry bailouts, only to see some of their top leaders go to prison for taking bribes while also failing to increase their ranks at companies like Nissan and Tesla. They’re pissed, and they have every right to be pissed.
But that’s only part of the challenge here. The other issue that looms over this showdown has to do with electric vehicles. Take the battery plants springing up all over America, spurred in large part by incentives from the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Nowhere does this pro-EV legislation say that the green jobs coming soon have to be union jobs, even if they’re building batteries for tomorrow’s EVs. Meanwhile, EVs generally require far less labor and parts to build than their gasoline-powered counterparts; they’re essentially batteries, bodies, software and an assortment of other components. Engines and transmissions are complicated things, but they’re simply not necessary for what’s coming. It’s often believed that the transition to EVs will mean fewer auto industry jobs, period; that’s actually very hard to gauge, but it’s no stretch to think this transition won’t be easy, seamless, or provide a comparable job for every single worker — including those at the many related companies that supply various parts and components.
But you can probably see where this is going. If you have a good-paying union job making trucks or transmissions for General Motors, what happens to you when they need fewer workers someday to assemble an electric truck — or when complex nine-speed automatic transmissions designed to work with gas engines aren’t needed at all? And if you’re a worker at the GM’s Ultium battery plant in Ohio, why are you making almost half what your counterparts are to build the future of the American auto industry? In other words: Will the electric future of the car business include good jobs for those who build them, or not?
Those who follow the auto industry, or work in it, have been seeing this play out elsewhere for some time now, especially in countries with far stronger labor unions than America generally has. In Europe, Volkswagen has been cutting thousands of jobs for years now as it attempts to shore up money to pay for a costly electric transition (something it’s clearly struggling with.) BMW’s CEO made waves last year for promising not to do the same, but whether he can actually make good on it or not remains to be seen. In Japan, former Toyota president (and current chairman) Akio Toyoda has warned of millions of job losses in that country alone if the industry goes all-electric. The same job-loss fears have led to labor actions in South Korea, too, home of Hyundai Motor Group, one of the most EV-ambitious car companies in the world. Who knows; if these unions team up, who’s to say we won’t see coordinated strikes as part of a global action?
Essentially, versions of this fight are playing out everywhere cars are made, and it’s hard to see an endgame to that no matter where you go. The story is the same everywhere: whatever the future of the auto industry is, it may just not need as many jobs as it has now, and even if it does, a ton of people will get lost in the shuffle.
Adding to all of this is a rising China, which is turning out some seriously impressive EVs that have Europe’s automakers rightfully spooked. (Those cars are kept out of our market by steep tariffs, for now anyway.) On top of being actually good, those cars are much cheaper than the competition. Why? Besides China getting great at building them at scale, there are deeply questionable labor practices, to put it politely, across all of that country’s battery and EV supply chain.
And then there’s the staggering cost involved with these companies’ transition to becoming EV companies, something not all of them will survive. Here in America, if you ask the Big Three automakers, they simply cannot afford to grant the UAW’s pay raise demands. Not as they invest trillions of dollars over the next few decades to transition to an industry driven by batteries and software instead of engines and hardware features. The automakers are dealing with a workforce that feels like it’s been left behind,, the costs involved with pivoting their businesses, and the ever-insatiable demands of shareholders.
It’s a tough spot to be in, but then again, each of the Big Three is led by an executive making at least $20 million per year, so maybe they can figure something out, particularly when they’re raking in record profits.
It’s possible that the battery plants will be key to saving auto industry jobs. Engineering researchers at Carnegie Mellon have found that while fewer auto parts are needed in EVs, battery manufacturing is so complex that the overall labor needs might potentially even out. And it’s true that battery factories are certainly popping up everywhere EVs are sold, not just in America.
But here, there’s an added complication: Most battery factories being built are ventures with companies like LG and SK On, which do not have agreements with the UAW. In other words, there’s no guarantee those will automatically be good-paying union jobs. Granted, the UAW has already scored a small victory on that front. Workers at GM’s LG joint venture battery plant in Ohio plant voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW last December, and as union negotiations went on this year, GM acquiesced and granted them a 25% raise and back pay — though they’d still be paid less than other UAW members. Maybe that will change as negotiations are finalized, but it may also not get fully resolved in this contract process.
Finally, there’s the question of what this strike means for the rest of the industry. It’s entirely possible that if the UAW gets an extremely favorable contract, it will aim its guns at Tesla next, or the Asian and European U.S.-based plants that have eluded unionization for so long. Surely, Honda and Volkswagen’s American workers have concerns about their future too, and Tesla’s workers make $20 an hour less in wages and benefits than their UAW counterparts.
If the UAW can score some major wins here, there’s nothing to say this can’t be the start of something bigger.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The Environmental Protection Agency just unveiled its argument against regulating greenhouse emissions from power plants.
In federal policymaking, the weight of the law can rest on a single word. When it comes to reducing planet-warming emissions from the power sector, that word is “significantly.” The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate any stationary source of emissions that “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
The EPA has considered power plants a significant source of dangerous greenhouse gases since 2015. But today, Trump’s EPA said, actually, never mind.
A proposed rule published in the Federal Register on Wednesday argues that U.S. fossil fuel-fired power plants make up “a small and decreasing part of global emissions” and therefore are not significant, and do not require regulation under the law. The rule would repeal all greenhouse gas emission standards for new and existing power plants — both the standards the Biden administration finalized last year, which have been tied up in court, as well as the standards that preceded them, which were enacted by Obama in 2015.
In a separate proposal, the EPA also took steps to repeal limits on mercury and hazardous air pollutants from coal plants that were enacted last year, reverting the standard back to one set in 2012.
The argument that U.S. power plants make up a small sliver of global emissions and thus aren’t worth addressing is like having “a five-alarm fire that could be put out if you send out all the trucks, and you don’t send any of the trucks because no one truck could put the fire out by itself,” David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “We just think that is a wacky reversal and a wacky interpretation of the Clean Air Act.”
When you add up every plug, power button, and light switch across the country, electricity usage produces 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year. Over the past 30 years, American power plants have contributed about 5% of the total climate pollution spewed into the atmosphere worldwide.
In the global context, that may sound small. But in a recent report titled “The Scale of Significance," New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that if U.S. power plants were a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter in the world, behind China, the European Union, India, Russia, and the remainder of U.S. emissions. The report also notes that U.S. actions on emissions make other countries more likely to follow, due to technological spillovers that reduce the cost of decarbonization globally.
In addition to the significance finding, the EPA gave two other reasons for repealing the power plant rules. It argued that “cost-effective control measures are not reasonably available,” meaning there’s no economic way to reduce emissions at the source. It also said the new administration’s priority “is to promote the public health or welfare through energy dominance and independence secured by using fossil fuels to generate power.”
The first argument is an attempt to say that Biden’s standards flouted the law. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could not simply tell states to reduce emissions from the power sector, which is what the Obama administration had initially tried to do. Instead, the agency would have to develop standards that could be applied on a plant-by-plant basis — so long as those rules were “cost-reasonable” and “adequately demonstrated.”
To comply with that ruling, Biden’s EPA based its standards on the potential to install carbon capture technology that can reduce flue gas emissions by 90%. The regulations would have required existing coal plants to install carbon capture by 2039, or else shut down. (To the chagrin of many energy system observers, the administration chose not to apply limits to existing gas-fired power plants.) But while fossil fuel companies and utilities had, in the past, asserted that carbon capture was viable, they deemed the standards impossible to meet.
Trump’s EPA is now agreeing. “In 2024,” Zeldin said on Wednesday, “rules were enacted seeking to suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment, to make all sorts of industries including coal and more disappear, regulate them out of existence.”
When Trump moved to overturn Obama’s power plant regulations during his first term, his EPA did not contest the significance of the sector’s emissions, and simply enacted a weaker standard. A week before he left office, the agency also finalized a rule that set the threshold for “significance” at 3% of U.S. emissions — which exempted major polluters like refineries, but still applied to power plants.
This time, Trump has a new apparent game plan: Strip the Clean Air Act of its jurisdiction over greenhouse gases altogether. Today’s action was the first step; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said the agency will similarly “reconsider” emissions rules for cars and oil and gas drilling. But the cornerstone of the plan is to reverse what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — the 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases present a threat to public health and welfare, and therefore are one of the pollutants EPA must address under the Clean Air Act.
“The Trump administration is trying to say, don’t worry about the Clean Air Act. It will never apply, so you can go back to your old ways,” said Doniger. But if the argument that power plant emissions are insignificant is a stretch, appraising greenhouse gas emissions as benign is inconceivable, he said. “The endangerment finding was based, in 2009, on a Denali-sized mountain of evidence. Since then, it’s grown to Everest-size, so there’s no way that they would be able to put together a rational record saying the science is wrong.”
These highly technical questions of whether emissions are “significant” or whether carbon capture is “adequately demonstrated” could soon be determined by a group of people who lack both the expertise to answer them and the inclination to wade through thousands of pages of atmospheric science and chemical engineering documents: judges.
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned a long-held precedent known as Chevron deference. That ruling means that the courts are no longer required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of statute — judges must make their own determinations of whether agencies are following the intent of the law.
When environmental groups begin challenging the EPA’s repeals in court, judges are “going to be bombarded with the need to make these highly technical, nuanced decisions,” Michael Wara, a lawyer and scholar focused on climate and energy policy at Stanford University, told me. He said the reason Chevron deference was established in the first place is that judges didn’t want to be making engineering decisions about power plants. “They felt extremely uncomfortable having to make these calls.”
The conservative Supreme Court overturned the precedent because of a sense that political decisions were being dressed up in scientific reasoning. But Wara doesn’t think the courts are going to like being put back into the role of weighing technical minutia and making engineering decisions.
“It’s a past that the courts didn’t like and they tried to engineer a way out of via the Chevron doctrine,” he said. “I would expect that we’re going to see a drift back toward a doctrine that looks a little bit more Chevron-like, maybe less deference to agencies. But it’s hard to predict in the current environment what’s going to happen.”
Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.