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Current conditions: Breezy weather in Sarasota, Florida, is increasing today’s fire danger • Turin, Italy, is bracing for an April’s worth of rain in a single day • The aurora borealis may be visible over the northern U.S. tonight and tomorrow thanks to a geomagnetic storm.
The International Energy Agency released its monthly analysis of the global oil market on Tuesday, writing “buckle up.” The group cut its forecast by almost a third, estimating world oil demand will rise by 730,000 barrels per day in 2025, down from its estimate of just over 1 million barrels per day last month. The group further predicted the slowdown will extend into 2026 due to a “fragile macroeconomic environment” and the continued growth of EVs. Though “imports of oil, gas, and refined products were given exemptions from the tariffs announced by the United States,” IEA wrote that its analysis took into consideration “concerns that the measures could stoke inflation, slow economic growth, and intensify trade disputes.” The group noted that the new tariffs also make it more expensive to buy steel and the equipment required for drilling, and that “the situation is still fluid and substantial risks remain.”
On Monday, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries also cut its 2025 global oil demand forecast. Likewise citing the Trump tariffs, OPEC sees world oil demand rising 1.3 million barrels per day in 2025 and 1.28 million barrels per day in 2026, each down about 150,000 barrels per day from March’s forecast.
On Monday, energy executives and trade groups formally warned the Trump administration that its cuts to the Department of Energy would sabotage the president’s stated goal of “energy dominance.” As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer previously reported, the agency stands to lose nearly one-fifth of its employees to buyouts and layoffs, with The New York Times reporting Monday that some of the deepest cuts are anticipated at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Program Office, which also provides support for clean energy development. “LPO continues to play a critical role in financing infrastructure that enables new nuclear power development, revitalizes domestic mineral production, and modernizes both grid and gas systems — all central to the administration’s goals of lowering energy costs, reshoring manufacturing, and achieving energy dominance,” the 30 signatories wrote in the letter, which was addressed to Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
President Trump’s executive order meant to boost “beautiful clean coal” could cost “tens of billions” of solar grid interconnection investments, according to comments made by Grid Strategies president Rob Gramlich in a webinar reported on by PV Magazine. (Gramlich is also a Heatmap contributor.)
As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin pointed out last week, many of coal’s uses can be “easily substituted with other sources, such as natural gas,” which is part of why coal production has fallen in the U.S. since 2008. Trump’s order could extend about 50 gigawatts of coal that would otherwise likely have been retired, thereby limiting the amount of wind and solar that can come online. Gramlich’s co-host for the webinar, Roth Capital Partners Managing Director Phil Shen, added that he was “incrementally more pessimistic” about utility-scale solar given the administration’s bolstering of coal.
Wisconsin has seen a record number of wildfires in 2025, with local experts citing the warming climate and extended droughts as part of what is fueling the blazes. “We’ve never had this many fires in January and February ever in the state of Wisconsin,” Jim Bernier, the forest fire section manager of the state Department of National Resources, said in comments reported by Wisconsin Public Radio. Wisconsin averages around 864 wildfires annually; there have already been 470 wildfires in 2025, double what would be expected by this time of year. Making matters worse, researchers say that areas where urban development borders wildlands account for nearly 10% of the fire-prone land in the state. “We have to mentally prepare ourselves that … we’re in it for a long haul,” Bernier said.
A new report released Monday found that women are “significantly more likely than men to name climate change or environmental issues as their top political priority.” The research, conducted by the Environmental Voter Project, revealed that 62% of climate voters are women, compared to just 37% being men. The divide is most pronounced among young voters, with women aged 18-24 twice as likely as men of the same age to list climate as a top priority. “This report confirms what so many of us have known for years: women are leading the charge against the climate crisis,” Jane Fonda said in a statement shared with the study’s release. “Mothers, grandmothers, and daughters are showing up, organizing, and voting like our lives — and the lives of our children — depend on it.”
Environmental Voters Project
Making buses free in New York City would wipe out $600 million a year in net fare revenues for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — but create $1.5 billion a year in benefits for riders, boost ridership by 23%, and save riders 36 million hours a year, according to a new study by the transportation economist Charles Komanoff.
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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.
Rob and Jesse assess the climate geopolitics of Trump’s latest trade moves.
Donald Trump has implemented what is easily the most chaotic set of American economic policies in recent memory. First, the U.S. declared a trade war on the entire world, imposing breathtaking tariffs on many of the country’s biggest trading partners. He’s paused that effort — but scaled up punitive tariffs on China, launching what would be the 21st century’s biggest global economic realignment without any apparent plan. Now Trump says that more levies are coming on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, no matter where we get them.
All of this is a disaster for the U.S. economy — but it’s also ruinous for any potential American role in decarbonization or the fight against climate change. Even more than Trump’s deregulatory actions, his trade war could spell the end of a long-held U.S. decarbonization dream.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat about what Trump’s chaotic economic policy could mean for the global fight against climate change. What happens to global decarbonization if the U.S. no longer participates? If the U.S. kills its research sector, what happens next? And could China seize this moment to expand its clean tech sector? 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.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Just to put a pin in the second point you raised, too, on finance — this is such, I think, a critical piece of the potential role, as you said, of the United States and others in influencing development paths in emerging economies. In many cases, the sovereign risks of those markets — the risks related to the potential lack of rule of law or presence of corruption or currency risk and uncertainty or fiscal risk, other things that characterize these environments that, in contrast typically, historically, at least, to the United States and its stability — lead to higher financial costs for everything in these countries, whatever you’re trying to build. And since so many components of the clean energy transition are capital intensive assets — investing in a wind farm, or a solar farm, or manufacturing capacity, or new low-carbon steel production, these all require huge amounts of upfront capital investment.
And so if the U.S. and other international partners can help lower the interest rates and costs of financing that are needed for deployment of these technologies abroad, that has a pretty substantial influence on the actual competitiveness or relative competitiveness of this infrastructure and the ability of emerging economies to afford to deploy it. So that’s one of the kind of key levers that I think is often underappreciated in this stor, and I appreciated that you called that out.
Robinson Meyer: And I would say historically, it’s also something we’ve totally underperformed. It’s a hugely important lever, and it’s also something that Republican and Democratic administrations alike — Republican more than Democratic, but both kinds of administrations have really not contributed enough to the financial cause, here. And so the argument is that the Trump administration, with its broad array of policies, but also with this specific reckless, unplanned, and pretty idiotic trade war that it’s begun in the past two weeks, has undermined all of those advantages for the United States and undermined America’s ability to play any of those roles in a global context.
I would add to all of this that I think there’s another part of the story that I hint at, but don’t go into, which is that obviously the U.S. has withdrawn again from the Paris Agreement, or is in the process of withdrawing again from the Paris Agreement. Beyond Paris alone, climate change is a public problem for the world. It’s a problem of the global public. That’s not the only kind of problem it is — it’s also a developmental problem, as we’ve been discussing. But it is generally higher on the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs for governments than other things they might need to attend to. And so addressing climate change is only possible in a world that is peaceful, rule-following, generally ordered by norms and something approaching laws, rather than a simple imperial prerogative. And of course, the Trump administration’s actions — not only in this trade war, but also over the course of a few months — have been disastrous for that. I think that’s worth stipulating going forward.
Part of what I was trying to do with this piece was, we know that Donald Trump is waging war on the regulatory state. We know that he’s waging war on international climate treaties, and people are very used to thinking about that. But I think understanding this most recent imbecilic action, this trade war that he’s launched against the entire world and then kind of focused on China, also massively undercuts any kind of climate action. And we should be unafraid to say that — at least any kind of climate action that the United States would play a role in.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
There is one area where China depends on U.S. imports: the building materials for plastics.
While much of the focus of President Donald Trump’s trade war has been on the United States’ yawning trade deficit with China, the U.S. does have considerable exports going the other way — agricultural products like soybeans, technology products like semiconductors, and fossil fuels and petroleum products.
Those exports are not just actual crude oil, but also petrochemical feedstocks, which are a key input for China’s industrial production and represent a rare area of Chinese dependence on the United States.
To the extent this trade is imperiled by 125% tariffs on U.S. imports to China, put in place after the U.S. applied 145% tariffs to Chinese imports, it will be yet another example of how Trump’s second term could prove ironically disastrous for the oil and gas industry — first by making its inputs more expensive, then by helping sink oil prices, and now by inducing large taxes on American exports.
One of those feedstocks is ethane, which is extracted from natural gas. The U.S.-China ethane trade is relatively new — the first U.S. ethane ship left Morgan’s Point, Texas in 2019. Since then, annual U.S. exports to China have increased from just under 4 million barrels to 83 million barrels in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. U.S. feedstock exports to China have grown up alongside China’s petrochemical industry, to the point where analysts at S&P Global have warned of “overcapacity.”
“The speed and scale of the expansion of China’s petrochemical sector dwarfs any historical precedent,” wrote the International Energy Agency in 2023, noting that planned production capacity increases in China since 2019 for ethylene and propylene were set to match all production capacity in Europe, Japan, and Korea combined.
The U.S.-China trade in petrochemical feedstocks had, until this year, represented the strengths of each respective economy working in sync to buoy global manufacturing. U.S. production of ethane and other liquids had soared thanks to the fracking boom. In turn, China invested heavily in its capacity to process these fuels and churn out plastics for use across its economy — and often in exports back to the United States.
I reached out to a number of companies involved in ethane and propane exports, as well as trade groups for the oil and gas industry to talk about how tariffs are affecting their business. None of them responded.
But it is safe to say that business could soon be starved of key inputs.
“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 me. “China is already looking to buy more crude from OPEC states to make up for losing U.S. [imports]. NGLs are sure to follow.”
Those “NGLs”, a.k.a.natural gas liquids, including ethane, propane, and butane, are produced as a byproduct of oil and gas drilling and processing and are often used as feedstocks for making plastics. Ethane is converted into ethylene by a high-heat process known as “cracking,” then converted into polyethylene pellets, which find their way into many of the plastic products we use every day. A similar process turns propane, which can be derived from natural gas or crude oil, into polypropylene.
This growing mutual dependence has involved enormous capital investments in both the United States and in China to develop pipeline, storage, cooling and shipping infrastructure. The Chinese ethane processing industry was set to receive some $16 billion in new investment to import and process the gas, Reuters reported in February, while U.S. energy companies were working to expand their export capacity.
When an analyst asked James Teague, the co-chief executive of major pipeline company Enterprise Product Partners, in February about the prospect of tariff retaliation affecting exports to China, Teague noted confidently “those crackers can only use ethane,” and so “from an NGL perspective, I’m not worried.”
The ethane trade is a kind of mirror image of how U.S.-China trade is often thought of. Instead of America depending on China for batteries or rare earths, when it comes to ethane, it’s China that depends on the United States.
Almost half of all United States ethane exports went to China in 2023, according to EIA data, while the analytics firm Kpler put the portion of ethane exports in 2024 to China at 57%, according to figures cited by Reuters. “The United States represented practically all of China’s imports of the feedstock over the past seven years,” the news service reported.
“Chinese petrochemical crackers that use ethane as a feedstock rely exclusively on U.S. volumes,” according to the trade publication RBN Energy. “The tariffs will make U.S. ethane uneconomical, and these facilities will face two choices: absorb the cost or shut down.”
That risk goes both ways: “We see an increasing risk to U.S. export volumes,” wrote Citi analyst Spiro Dounis in a note to clients last week. “Both countries are heavily dependent on each other when it comes to NGLs and tariffs throw a significant wrench into the relationship.” That leaves Chinese importers of ethane with the grim choice of “either shutting in capacity or running at a loss.”
There’s likely a similar story playing out with propane and propylene. Propane exports to China have grown to over 114 million barrels in 2024, compared to just over 6 million 10 years prior, according to EIA data.
The price of propane in the United States has “plummeted” since China imposed its retaliatory tariffs, according to Bloomberg, while Chinese importers of the fuel are “getting gouged by traders taking advantage of their distress.”
“China … will face higher costs and potential shutdowns of [propane dehydrogenation] plants due to increased procurement costs and reduced downstream demand,” Drewry analyst Nisha Manav told me in an email. “This could lead to demand destruction in the country due to reduced operating rates at PDH plants. Alternatively, the U.S. will struggle to find alternative markets, leading to inventory build-ups and lower export opportunities.”
The EIA called our propane specifically in its most recent short term energy outlook, released this month. “We expect that China’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods will have the largest effect on propane,” the report’s authors said. That will likely lead to increased inventories of propane in the United States and lower prices domestically.