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Ideas

Ideas

Global Climate Politics Had a Rough 2024

In 2025, it’s time for stern resolve and bold maneuvers.

Green
Ideas

How Covid Shaped Climate Policy

Five years from the emergence of the disease, the world — and the climate — is still grappling with its effects.

Seeing a glass half full.

Biden’s Climate Law Can’t Die. Wall Street Loves It Too Much.

A cynical optimist’s take on the Inflation Reduction Act.

Green
Donald Trump.

Trump’s Gift to China

Who will benefit most from repealing the Inflation Reduction Act?

Red
Ideas

Trump Is Not the End of the Climate Fight

The next battle begins today.

Donald Trump and clean energy.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

I won’t sugar coat this: The election of Donald Trump to a second term with a likely governing trifecta has dealt a devastating blow to U.S. efforts to cut climate-warming pollution.

I’ve spent the past four years analyzing the progress made under the Biden-Harris Administration as leader of the REPEAT Project, which uses energy systems models to rapidly assess the impact of federal energy and climate policies. In that time, the passage of landmark legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — and finalization of key federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, cars and trucks, and oil and gas supply chains put the U.S. on track to more than double its pace of decarbonization and avoid about 6 billion tons of cumulative emissions through 2035. Though even that progress was not enough: Recent policies would do only about half the work required to bend U.S. emissions onto a net-zero pathway by 2035.

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Ideas

Abundance, Not Additionality, Will Meet the Energy Demands of AI

A counter-proposal for the country’s energy future.

Power lines.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

American electricity consumption is growing for the first time in generations. And though low-carbon technologies such as solar and wind have scaled impressively over the past decade, many observers are concerned that all this new demand will provide “a lifeline for more fossil fuel production,” as Senator Martin Heinrich put it.

In response, a few policy entrepreneurs have proposed novel regulations known as “additionality” requirements to handle new sources of electric load. First suggested for electrolytic hydrogen, additionality standards would require that subsidized hydrogen producers source their electricity directly from newly built low-carbon power plants; in a Heatmap piece from September, Brian Deese and Lisa Hansmann proposed similar requirements for new artificial intelligence. And while AI data centers were their focus, the two argued that additionality “is a model that can be extended to address other sectors facing growing energy demand.”

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