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Rob and Jesse dig into the implications of the House budget bill.
Republicans are preparing to tear up America’s clean energy tax credits as part of their budget reconciliation megabill. Hollowing out those policies will have sweeping implications for the country’s energy system — it could set back solar, nuclear, and geothermal development; bring less electricity supply onto the grid; and devastate the country’s fledgling electric vehicle supply chain.
A new report — written by our own Jesse Jenkins — is all about the real-life consequences of killing the tax credits. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse shares the forthcoming analysis of the bill from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project. Rob and Jesse discuss what best-in-class modeling tells us the bill will mean for carbon emissions, the energy economy, the power grid, and consumer energy costs. 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:
Robinson Meyer: We may not know exactly what Republicans in Congress are going to do, but when you look at the set of possibilities encapsulated by the Republican bill, what does this mean for the energy system and for the climate? Is it good?
Jesse Jenkins: Uh, no, it is not good. And I wish I had some silver linings to pull out here, but they are non-existent — or few and far between, if there are any we can find. Dismantling the current policy trajectory would result in a substantial increase in greenhouse gas emissions, on the order of half a gigaton, 500 million tons, by 2030, rising to over a billion metric tons, or a gigaton by 2035.
And at the same time it would, of course, slow the energy transition. So less deployment of clean electricity technologies, a slower uptake of electric vehicles, and other impacts across the economy. And all that also translates to higher energy costs for Americans, for households, for businesses as we do two things. One is we remove tax credits and subsidies that are currently lowering the cost of investing in all of this new infrastructure, whether it’s new power generation or storage or new vehicles for fleets or households.
So those subsidies shift some costs out of household and business budgets right onto the federal tax code. And by slowing down measures like energy efficiency, electrification, EVs, measures that reduce fossil energy consumption, we’re also likely to see fossil fuel prices go up as demand rises. So relative to a world where we’re reducing demand for these fuels, if we slow down that process and we consume more fossil fuels overall, that’s also going to translate through the law of supply and demand into higher costs for Americans.
So that’s, I think, the top line: Higher emissions, slow down — although not halt — the energy transition, and higher energy costs for most Americans and for our businesses around the country. It’s not quite our frozen policy scenario from the beginning of January, 2021. But not surprisingly, a scenario where we dismantle the entirety of the Biden-era policy apparatus does revert us pretty close to where we would be if those laws had not passed. Not entirely. There’s some momentum that will continue. But a full repeal scenario, which is maybe where the House is trending, would mean that we’re going to see half-a-gigaton-scale increase in emissions from our current trajectory in 2030, and about a gigaton or more in 2035.
Meyer: I realize that there’s a tendency for numbers, especially gigatons, these numbers attached to giant units, to slide by and kind of be like, Oh, that’s a number. But that is staggering. U.S. energy emissions are about five gigatons. I think global energy emissions are 38 gigatons …
Jenkins: Yeah, close to 40. Exactly.
Meyer: This is a sizable increase compared to baseline in carbon emissions.
You can read the complete transcript here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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The energy sector — including oil and gas — and manufacturing took some heavy hits in the latest jobs report.
We got a much better sense of what the American labor market is doing today. And the news was not good.
The economy added only 22,000 jobs last month, far fewer than economists had predicted, according to a new release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The new data also shows that the economy gained slightly more jobs in July than we thought at the time, but that it actually lost 13,000 jobs in June — making that month the first since 2020 to see a true decline in U.S. employment.
The unemployment rate now stands at 4.3%, one tenth of a percent higher than it was last month. All in all, the American labor market has been frozen since President Trump declared “Liberation Day” and announced a bevy of new tariffs in April.
On the one hand, some aspects of that job loss shouldn’t be a surprise. As we’ve covered at Heatmap, the Trump administration has spent the past few months attacking the wind, solar, and electric vehicle industries. It has yanked subsidies from new electricity generation, rewritten rules on the fly, and waged an all-out regulatory war on offshore wind farms. Electricity costs are rising nationwide, constraining essentially all power-dependent industries except artificial intelligence.
In short: The news hasn’t been good for the transition industries. But what’s notable in this report is that the job declines are not limited to these green industries. The first eight months of Donald Trump’s presidency have been more and more damaging for the blue collar fields and heavy industries that he promised to help.
For instance: Mining, quarrying, and oil extraction lost 6,000 jobs in August. These losses were led by the oil and gas industry, as well as mining support companies. Other industries — such as coal mining firms — saw essentially no growth or very slightly declines.
More cuts are likely to come soon for the fossil fuel industry. The oil giant ConocoPhillips says it will lay off about a quarter of its roughly 13,000-person workforce before the year is out. The oilfield services company Halliburton has also been shedding workers in recent weeks, according to Reuters. The West Texas benchmark oil price has lost nearly $10 since the year began, and is now hovering around $62. That’s roughly the average breakeven price for drilling new wells in the Permian Basin.
The manufacturing industry has lost 78,000 jobs since the year began. In the past month, it shed jobs almost as fast as the federal government, which has deliberately culled its workforce, as the economic analyst Mike Konczal observed.
This manufacturing weakness is also showing up in corporate earnings. John Deere, the American farm equipment maker, has seen its income degrade through the year. It estimates that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs will cost the company $600 million in 2025, and it recently laid off several hundred workers in the Midwest.
Even industries that have previously shown some resilience — and that benefited from the AI boom — have started to stall out a bit. The utility industry lost about 1,000 jobs last month, on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the new data. (At the same time, the number of non-managerial utility workers slightly increased.) The utility sector has still gained more than 6,000 jobs compared to a year ago.
A few months ago, I quipped that you could call President Trump “Degrowth Donald” because his tax and trade policies seemed intent on raising prices and killing the carbon-intensive sectors of the American economy. (Of course, Trump was doing plenty that radical climate activists didn’t want to see, too, and his anti-renewable campaign has only gotten worse.) Now we’re seeing the president’s anti-growth policies bear fruit. It was a joke then. Now it’s just sad.
Trump’s enthusiasm for the space has proved contagious — building on what Biden started.
It’s become a well-known adage in energy circles that “critical minerals are the new oil.” As the world pushes — haltingly but persistently — toward decarbonization and electrification, minerals such as lithium, nickel, and copper have only risen in their strategic importance.
These elements are geographically concentrated, largely in spots with weighty implications for geopolitics and national security — lithium largely in South America and Australia, copper in South America, nickel in Indonesia, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and graphite in China. They’re also subject to volatile price swings and dependent on vast infrastructure to get them out of the ground. But without them, there are no batteries, no magnets, no photovoltaic cells, no semiconductors, no electrical wiring. It is no surprise, then, that it’s already been a big year for investment.
Sector-wide data is scarce, but the announcements are plentiful. Some of the biggest wins so far this year include the AI minerals discovery company Kobold, which closed a colossal $537 million funding round, software-driven mining developer Mariana Minerals landing $85 million in investment, rare earth magnet startup Vulcan Minerals raising $65 million, and minerals recycling company Cyclic Materials announcing plans for a commercial plant in Canada.
“The good investments are still the good investments,” Joe Goodman, co-founder and managing partner at the firm VoLo Earth Ventures, told me. “But I think the return opportunities are larger now.” VoLo’s primary bets include Magrathea, which has an electrolysis-based process to produce pure magnesium from seawater and brines and is reportedly in discussions to form a $100 million partnership for a commercial-scale demonstration plant, as well as Nth Cycle, which recovers and refines critical minerals from sources such as industrial waste and low-grade ores and is well into its first full year of commercial operations.
Much of this activity has been catalyzed by the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for critical minerals. The president has issued executive orders aimed at increasing and expediting domestic minerals production in the name of national defense, and a few weeks ago, announced its intent to issue nearly $1 billion in funding aimed at scaling every stage of the critical minerals supply chain, from mining and processing to manufacturing. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at the time, “For too long, the United States has relied on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life and our national security.”
Ironically, the Trump administration is building on a foundation laid by former President Biden as part of his administration’s efforts to decarbonize the economy and expedite the energy transition. In 2022, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to give the federal government more leeway to support domestic extraction, refining, and recycling of minerals. It also invested billions of dollars from the previous year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to secure a “Made In America supply chain for critical minerals.” These initiatives helped catalyze $120 billion in private sector investments, the administration said.
While they were “motivated by radically different ideologies,” Goodman told me, the message is the same: “We care a lot about our minerals.” As he put it, “The last two administrations could not have been better orchestrated to send that message to public markets.”
Ultimately, political motivations matter far less than cash. In that vein, many companies and venture capitalists are now aligning with the current administration’s priorities. As the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz noted in an article titled “It’s Time to Mine: Securing Critical Minerals,” an F-35 fighter jet requires 920 pounds of rare earth elements, a Navy missile destroyer needs 5,200 pounds, and a nuclear-powered submarine take a whopping 9,200 pounds. Rare earths — a group of metals that form a key subset of critical minerals — are crucial components of the high-performance magnets, precision electronics, and sensors these defense systems rely on.
The military is also certainly interested in energy storage systems, including novel battery chemistries with potential to be more efficient and cost effective than the status quo. This just so happens to be the realm of many a lucrative startup, from Form Energy’s iron-air batteries to Lyten’s bet on lithium-sulfur and Peak Energy’s sodium-ion chemistry.
The Army has also gone all in on microgrids, frequently building installations that rely on solar plus storage. And batteries for use in drones, cargo planes and tactical vehicles are often simply the most practical option, given that they can operate in near silence and reduce vulnerabilities associated with refueling. “It’s much easier to get electricity into contested logistics than it is to get hydrocarbons,” Duncan Turner, a general partner at the venture capital firm SOSV, told me.
Turner has overseen the firm’s investments in minerals companies across the supply chain, a number of which focus on the extraction or refining of just one or a few minerals. For example, SOSV’s portfolio company Still Bright is developing an electrochemical process to extract copper from both high-grade ores as well as mining waste, replacing traditional copper smelting methods. The minerals recycling company XEra Energy is initially focused on reclaiming nickel from ore concentrates and used batteries, though it plans to expand into other battery materials, as well, while the metal recycling company Biometallica is developing a process to recover palladium, platinum, and rhodium from e-waste.
These startups could theoretically use their tech to go after a whole host of minerals, but Turner explained that many find the most lucrative strategy is to fine tune their processes for certain minerals in particular. “That is just a telltale sign of maturity in the market,” he told me, as companies identify their sweet spot and carve out a profitable niche.
Clea Kolster, the head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, was bullish on the potential for critical minerals investments well before the Trump administration shifted the conversation toward their role in the defense sector. “Our view was always that demand for these minerals was just going to increase,” she told me. “This administration has certainly provided a boon and validator for our thesis, but these investments were made on the basis that these would render metal production cheaper and more accessible.”
Lowercarbon was an early investor in the well-capitalized startup Lilac Solutions, first backing the company’s pursuit of a more efficient and sustainable method of lithium brine extraction in early 2020. Since then, Lilac has raised hundreds of millions in additional funding rounds — which Lowercarbon has led — and is now seeking additional capital as it plans for its first commercial lithium production plant in Utah. Lilac isn’t the firm’s only lithium bet — it’s also backing Lithios, a company developing an electrochemical method for separating lithium from brines, and Novalith, which is working on a carbon-negative process for extracting lithium from hard rock without the use of environmentally damaging acids.
Kolster admitted that in Lowercarbon’s early days, the firm “didn’t fully appreciate how significant those additional narratives would become beyond decarbonization,” pointing to critical minerals’ newly prominent role not just in defense, but also in the AI arms race. After all, no new transmission lines, transformers, gear to turn circuits on and off, or other critical grid components can be built or scaled to support the rising electricity demands of data centers without critical minerals.
Goodman told me that some generalist investors have yet to take note of this, however. “There’s large pockets of the investment community who feel like climate is out of the rotation,” he said.
“So in a way we’re experiencing a better pricing opportunity right now, access to higher quality deals.”
From here on out, he predicts we’ll see a steady stream of announcements signaling that the U.S. has secured yet another link in the minerals supply chain, which will be crucial to counter China’s global influence. “I think annually you’ll be seeing the US raise the flag and declare success on another mineral,” Goodman told me. “It might be two years after we raise the flag that a facility is actually operational. But there's going to be a cadence to us taking back our supply chain.”
On a Justice Department crackdown, net zero’s costs, and Democrats’ nuclear fears
Current conditions: Hurricane Lorena, a Category 1 storm, is threatening Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. with flooding and 80 mile-per-hour winds • In the Pacific, Hurricane Kiko strengthened to a Category 4 storm as it heads toward Hawaii • South Africa’s Northern Cape is facing extremely high fire risks.
The owners of Revolution Wind are fighting back against the stop-work order from President Donald Trump that halted construction on the offshore wind project off the coast of Rhode Island last month. On Thursday, Orsted and Skyborn Renewables filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accusing the Trump administration of causing “substantial harm” to a legally permitted project that was 80% complete. The litigation claimed that the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management “lacked legal authority for the stop-work order and that the stop-work order’s stated basis violated applicable law.”
“Revolution Wind secured all required federal and state permits in 2023, following reviews that began more than nine years ago,” the companies said in a press release. “Revolution Wind has spent and committed billions of dollars in reliance upon this fulsome review process.” The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut filed a similar complaint on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, seeking to “restore the rule of law, protect their energy and economic interests, and ensure that the federal government honors its commitments.” Analysts didn’t expect the order to hold, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, though the cost to the project’s owners was likely to rise. As I have reported repeatedly in this newsletter over the past few weeks, the Trump administration is enlisting at least half a dozen agencies in a widening attack meant to eliminate a generating technology that is rapidly growing overseas.
After the cleanup in Altadena, California.Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Department of Justice sued South California Edison on Thursday for $77 million in damages, accusing the utility of negligence that caused two deadly wildfires. Federal prosecutors in California alleged the utility failed to maintain infrastructure that ultimately sparked the Eaton fire in January, and the 2022 Fairview fire in Riverside County, The Wall Street Journal reported. The fires collectively killed about two dozen people and charred more than 42,000 acres of land. “Hardworking Californians should not pick up the tab for Edison’s negligence,” said Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. Attorney for California’s Central District, where the lawsuit was filed.
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It sure sounds like a lot of money. In a new research note released this week, the energy consultancy BloombergNEF calculated the total cost to transition the global economy off unmitigated fossil fuels by 2050 at $304 trillion. But that’s only 9% above the cost of continuing to develop worldwide energy systems on economics alone, which would result in 2.6 degrees Celsius of global warming. That margin is relatively narrow because the operating costs of cleaner technologies such as electric vehicles and renewable power generators are lower than the cost of fuel in the long term. The calculation also doesn’t account for the savings from avoided climate disasters in a net-zero scenario that halts the planet’s temperature spike at 1.7 degrees Celsius. While the cost of investing in renewables, grid infrastructure, electric vehicles, and carbon capture technology would add $45 trillion in additional investment, it’s ultimately offset by $19 trillion in annual savings from making the switch.
Microsoft has signed a series of deals that tighten the tech giant’s grip on the nascent carbon removal market. With new agreements that involve direct air capture in North American and burning garbage for energy in Oslo, Microsoft now accounts for 80% of all credits ever purchased from tech-based carbon removal projects. The company made up 92% of purchases in the first half of this year, the Financial Times reported, citing the data provider AlliedOffsets. By comparison, Amazon made up 0.7% of the market and Google comprised 1.4%.
We are still far from where carbon removal needs to be to make an impact on emissions. All the Paris Agreement-consistent scenarios modeled in the scientific literature require removing between 4 billion and 6 billion metric tons of carbon per year by 2035, and between 6 billion and 10 billion metric tons by 2050, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote recently. “For context, they estimate that the world currently removes about 2 billion metric tons of carbon per year over and above what the Earth would naturally absorb without human interference.”
At a hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the two Democrats left on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress they feared Trump would fire them if they raised safety concerns about new reactors. Matthew Marzano said the “NRC would not license a reactor” that didn’t pass safety standards, but that it’s a “possibility” the White House would oust him for withholding approval. “I think on any given day, I could be fired by the administration for reasons unknown,” Crowell told lawmakers, according to a write-up of the hearing in E&E News.
Hitachi Energy announced more than $1 billion in investments to expand manufacturing of electrical grid infrastructure in the U.S. That includes about $457 million for a new large power transformer facility in Virginia. “Power transformers are a linchpin technology for a robust and reliable electric grid and winning the AI race,” Andreas Schierenbeck, chief executive of Hitachi Energy, said in a press release. “Bringing production of large power transformers to the U.S. is critical to building a strong domestic supply chain for the U.S. economy and reducing production bottlenecks, which is essential as demand for these transformers across the economy is surging.”