Politics
New GOP Budget Bill Guts Decades-Old Fuel Economy Rules for Cars and Trucks
The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.
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The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.
What I’m hearing from developers and CEOs about the renewable energy industry after the Inflation Reduction Act
At a conference in New York, solar and wind developers warn of spiking electricity prices if IRA tax credits are cut.
On Musk vs. Trump, tech emissions, and V2G charging
On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Meta’s deal with Constellation is a full circle moment for an Illinois nuclear plant.
On rescissions, a nuclear deal, and a solar lawsuit
Current conditions: Thunderstorms today will span 1,000 miles from Detroit to Dallas • NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters aircrews will begin their 2025 season by gathering weather data from a disturbance off the Southeast coast of the U.S.• Romanian officials are rerouting a stream to prevent the further inundation and collapse of one of Europe’s largest salt reserves following historic floods.
The White House on Tuesday formally asked Congress to rescind $9.4 billion in federal funds to make permanent some of the Department of Government Efficiency’s spending cuts. The 24-page proposal includes clawing back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, as well as $8.3 billion from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the African Development Foundation. Congress has 45 days to pass the measure.
Of particular note to Heatmap readers is the proposed recission of $1.7 billion of the $3.6 billion appropriated for the Economic Support Fund which, in the words of the State Department, “promotes the economic and political foreign policy interests of the United States by providing assistance to allies and countries in transition to democracy.” That has historically included working with partners to mitigate the impacts of climate change, although the White House said it aims to “refocus remaining resources on activities that align with an America First foreign policy.” Similarly, the White House asked Congress to rescind $125 million from the Clean Technology Fund, which provides financial resources for developing countries to invest in clean energy projects, arguing that it does “not reflect America’s values or put the American people first.” The White House also asked Congress to pull the full $460 million appropriated to Assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, which, it argued, has become a “mechanism for funding wasteful programs, including … climate programming.”
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has agreed to a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy to purchase the output of its Clinton Clean Energy Center, an Illinois-based nuclear plant. The deal, which begins in June 2027, includes a power purchase agreement that will entitle Meta to roughly 1.1 gigawatts of energy from the plant’s single nuclear reactor. It also allows the company to “buy the clean attributes of the nuclear-power generation to offset its less-green electricity use elsewhere” — including powering natural gas-reliant data centers in other parts of the country, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Though the financial terms weren’t disclosed, Constellation Chief Executive Joe Dominguez said, “It’s billions of dollars of capital that you’re signing up for to run a plant for 20 more years.” Meta will support the continued operation of the plant as well as upgrades and relicensing, which will prevent the facility’s premature closure, the companies said.
The California Supreme Court will hear arguments today brought by environmental groups in a lawsuit against the California Public Utility Commission for slashing the credits customers receive for selling electricity generated by rooftop solar back to the grid. The new financial structure, called NEM 3, went into effect in 2023, and in some cases cut credits by 80%. This has “stymied efforts to expand rooftop solar in the state, particularly in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods and led to huge layoffs in the solar industry,” Solar Power World explains. NEM 3 encouraged customers to use battery storage systems with their rooftop solar installations, a move viewed as friendlier to California utilities.
The Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Working Group, and the San Diego-based Protect Our Communities Foundation attempted to overturn NEM 3 after it went into effect, bringing their case to the California Court of Appeals, which ultimately upheld CPUC’s decision, leading to the California Supreme Court case. “It’s a fight that’s likely to continue, given that the Supreme Court appears poised to rule narrowly — and perhaps not even on the policy debate itself,” Politico’s California Climate newsletter notes.
Texas has removed BlackRock from a list of firms the state says “boycott” the fossil fuel industry, thereby allowing public agencies and pension funds to once again hire the firm, invest in its funds, and purchase shares of the asset manager, Bloomberg reports. State Comptroller Glenn Hegar specifically cited BlackRock’s retreat from climate action as influencing the decision.
BlackRock was first placed on the Texas divestment list in 2022 due to its involvement in the Climate Action 100+ initiative to reduce corporate greenhouse gas emissions, as well as Net Zero Asset Managers. Since then, BlackRock has removed itself from both programs. “We never set out to punish any of these firms, and the hope was always that any firm we included on the list would eventually take steps to ensure they were removed,” Hegar said in his remarks.
The National Weather Service is looking to hire back 125 meteorologists and specialists to its understaffed forecast offices, some of which have ceased around-the-clock monitoring and weather balloon launches due to lack of personnel, CNN reports. The move follows the NWS losing more than 560 employees this year due to the Trump administration’s efficiency cuts and early retirement offers, and functionally means lifting the federal hiring freeze for the agency so it can bolster its workforce heading into the fire, drought, extreme heat, and hurricane seasons. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is also looking to transfer 155 employees from better-staffed offices to “critical” positions at sparser offices, CNN adds.
But as I’ve reported, it is not so simple to restaff federal agencies after major layoffs. In addition to the deep staffing shortages that preceded and were exacerbated by Trump’s layoffs, the government has also damaged the appeal of working in the public sector. Most people don’t want to work for the government for the paycheck, Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, told me last month, but rather for the “opportunity to do meaningful work, and for job stability and security” — both of which have been damaged by the administration’s ongoing hostility toward federal workers.
The American Clean Power Association
The U.S. installed 7.4 gigawatts of utility-scale solar, wind, and energy storage in the first three months of 2025 — the second-strongest quarter on record behind only Q1 of 2024, the American Clean Power Association reports.
Rob and Jesse pick apart Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion with University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley.
Did the Supreme Court just make it easier to build things in this country — or did it give a once-in-a-lifetime gift to the fossil fuel industry? Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 against environmentalists who sought to use a key permitting law, the National Environmental Policy Act, to slow down a railroad in a remote but oil-rich part of Utah. Even the court’s liberals ruled against the green groups.
But the court’s conservative majority issued a much stronger and more expansive ruling, urging lower courts to stop interpreting the law as they have for years. That decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, may signal a new era for what has been called the “Magna Carta” of environmental law.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor and frequent writer on permitting issues. He is also Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s former chief legal counsel. Rob, Jesse, and Nick discuss what NEPA is, how it has helped (and perhaps hindered) the environment, and why it’s likely to change again in the near future. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It seems like what the court is doing here is not only basically using this to make a statement, it’s announcing a new jurisprudence on NEPA. We want you to start treating this law really, really differently than you’ve been treating it in the past. And like, we are going to come down into your room and force you to clean up this mess whenever we want to now because of how important we think this is.
Do you think that’s too strong a statement? It seems this is not only declaring what the court’s view on NEPA is, but almost declaring a new plan of action.
Nicholas Bagley: Like many Supreme Court decisions, I think it’s amenable to two competing interpretations. One is exactly as you say: It’s a new era of NEPA jurisprudence, and the basic rule of a NEPA case is now going to be that environmental groups lose. And so I think there’s no way to read the decision except as a walloping loss to environmental groups, at least as a matter of tone and, I think, intention by the Supreme Court.
But there is a narrower reading available, and one that suggests that maybe this decision won’t have as big an effect as maybe the Supreme Court justices want it to. And the reason for that is they didn’t close the door altogether on the judicial evaluation of the reasonableness of its actions. And when a court goes in and says, Hmm, has an agency acted arbitrarily? Again, that’s a multifaceted inquiry. It’s going to involve a lot of different factors. And the court says be deferential, but that’s actually always been the rule.
They use a lot of strident language here, but that strident language is not going to make a lick of difference if you get in front of a highly motivated judge who happens to dislike the project in question in a district court in New Mexico. And that happens. So if you’re an agency and you’re thinking to yourself, Can I cut back on the amount of environmental studies that I do? Can I not investigate these dopey alternatives? You might think to yourself, you know, I have like a 20% or a 30% chance, my odds are a little better than they were before — maybe even a lot better than they were before — at winning if this case is litigated. But they’re also not 100%. So maybe what I ought to do is keep doing what I’ve been doing just to be safe. And I think that’s at least a possibility. We don’t know how it’s going to play out on the ground.
The last thing I’ll say about this is, you said that the Supreme Court is going to act like your mom who’s going to come and tell you to clean up your room.
Meyer: Yeah, exactly. Yes.
Bagley: The trouble is it takes something like, what, 50 cases a year? There are hundreds of these cases brought, and there’s only so much the Supreme Court can do, and in closer cases I think it might just be inclined to let matters lie.
So, you know, I think it is reasonable to think that this is the Supreme Court’s effort to usher in a new era of unique NEPA jurisprudence. It is reasonable to think it is going to have some effects on agency behavior and some effects on lower court behavior. But it may not pretend the revolution that it looks like on its face.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.