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Policy Watch

This Week in Trumpian Climate Chaos

On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.

Musk and Trump in the Oval Office.
Getty Images/Heatmap Illustration

1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.

2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.

  • Johnson had said last year he wanted to take a “scalpel” to the IRA, emphasizing a surgical approach amid pushback from more moderate members of his caucus. But yesterday he told reporters on the Hill that any attempt at repeal will “be somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.”

3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.

  • Undoing the endangerment finding would legally be quite tricky but has the capacity to upend the marketplace’s confidence in almost two decades of energy and air pollution regulation that has proven a tailwind for renewables.

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Spotlight

It’s Getting Harder to Build a Solar Farm In America’s Sunniest State

A renewables fight in Arizona turns ugly.

Arizona solar farm.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Autumn Johnson told me some days it feels like she’s shouting into a void.

Johnson is the executive director for the Arizona branch of the Solar Energy Industries Association, the nation’s pre-eminent solar power trade group. Lately, she told me, she’s seeing an increasing number of communities go after potential solar farms, many of them places with little or no previous solar development. There’s so many she’s had to start “tracking them on a spreadsheet,” she tells me, then proceeding to rattle off the names of counties and towns like battles in a war. Heatmap Pro data reveals how restricted Arizona is today, with six out of the state’s 15 counties showing a restrictive ordinance on solar and/or wind energy.

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Hotspots

Congressman Asks Trump to Shut Down the Empire Wind Project

And more of the week’s top renewable energy fights.

Map of renewable energy fights.
Heatmap Illustration

1. Long Island, New York We begin today with a crucial stand-off for the future of energy off the coast of New York City: Rep. Chris Smith – one of the loudest anti-wind voices in Congress – is asking the Trump administration to shut down active work on the Empire Wind project.

  • Few in Congress have frustrated offshore wind developers more than Smith, a New Jersey Republican who used legislative maneuvers to get a Government Accountability Office study greenlit about the impacts of offshore wind on whale species.
  • In a letter Friday, which has not been previously reported, Smith requested the project be forcibly paused until the Trump administration can complete its purported government-wide review of the wind industry.
  • Smith also asked a host of additional mitigation requirements be placed on Empire Wind before it can proceed, including new specific requirements on impacts to air travel. The letter claims – without specifics – that the project could impact radar interference “in the shadow of three major airports.”
  • “Empire Wind cannot safely proceed until much needed further review [can] be done to protect the public and our eastern seaboard. I ask that you do everything in your power to halt Equinor’s underhanded rush to begin piledriving and block construction until the critical assessment can be completed,” Smith wrote.
  • I’ve asked Equinor to comment on this letter, as a stop-work order would be a massive escalation in the war on offshore wind. Alyse Sharpe, a public affairs specialist with the Interior Department, told me in an email the agency does "not comment on congressional correspondence" but said it "takes all correspondence from Congress seriously and reviews each matter" and should there be "any updates on this topic, we will provide further information at the appropriate time."

2. Gulf of Maine – American floating offshore wind is now taking one more step backwards, as Mitsubishi pulls out of the test arrays it was working on under Biden with researchers at the University of Maine.

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Q&A

How Should Regulators Grapple With Moss Landing?

A conversation with Dustin Mulvaney, professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University

Dustin Mulvaney
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Today’s conversation is with Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University. Mulvaney is a social scientist who spent much of his time before January 2025 advocating for more considerate and humane renewable energy development. Then Moss Landing happened. Mulvaney – who was there at Moss Landing the first day – is now obsessed with the myriad safety concerns laden in large-scale utility battery storage and what plans were in place to deal with the fire. His reasoning? A failure to grapple with safety concerns could undermine public trust in battery storage and make a transition away from fossil fuels more difficult.

The following is an abridged version of our conversation, which was the interview that first prompted me to investigate the mystery of the health concerns surrounding the fire.

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