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That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.
These are the 10 most important clean energy transition projects struggling to get off the ground
On critical minerals, Tesla’s home battery business, and India’s heat wave
Tristan Abbey would come to Washington from a Texas think tank that argues peak oil is way off base.
On auto imports, special elections, and Volvo’s new CEO
The South Korean automaker just opened an EV factory in Georgia. It’ll take a lot longer for others to catch up to Trump’s latest tariffs.
Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the cancellations weeks ago, but the agency has refused to provide details.
New documents obtained by Senate Democrats on the Environmental and Public Works Committee this week shed more light on the inner workings of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s attempt to shut down hundreds of climate- and environmental justice-related grants.
Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware secured a list of 477 grants the EPA has “targeted for termination,” along with damning internal emails from the agency that showed its management knew that many of its terminations to date violated contracts with grantees.
Democrats on the committee sent a letter to Zeldin on Tuesday alleging that EPA was breaking the law and demanding that it rescind any grant termination notices it has sent out.
The list of grants appears to align with a press release the EPA published on March 10 stating that Zeldin had canceled more than 400 grants worth more than $1.7 billion in his fourth round of spending cuts. This was in addition to the $20 billion “green bank” program Zeldin has been attempting to cut. EPA did not say which grants it was canceling or why in any of these rounds of cuts, but last week, the Sierra Club obtained a partial list of what appeared to be the first three rounds through a Freedom of Information Act request.
While nearly half of the grants on the Sierra Club’s list were for research into low-carbon construction materials like steel and cement, all of the funds on the new list were awarded to nonprofits, Tribes, cities, states, and universities for projects in disadvantaged communities.
Many of the grants are from three Inflation Reduction Act programs: the Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program, which funds nonprofit efforts to create new partnerships with companies, local governments, or medical service providers to address environmental or public health issues; the Community Change Grant Program, which supports activities that reduce pollution and increase climate resilience; and the Government-to-Government Program, which subsidizes state and local government pilot projects and other activities that improve the environment and public health.
They include awards of between $20,000 and $20 million for community gardens, solar projects, air quality monitoring, energy efficiency upgrades, wildfire preparedness, clean water initiatives, protection during heatwaves, rural economic development, and job training, among many others.
Just over 130 of the grants are reported as being “financially closed,” or having a $0.00 remaining balance, meaning the EPA’s claim that it canceled more than 400 grants may have been inflated.
There is also overlap with the list the EPA provided to the Sierra Club. Heatmap identified 18 grants that appear on both. For these 18 grants, the Sierra Club list shows that they were canceled on the 21st or 22nd of February. The list obtained by the senators shows that they were “awarded” on those dates, but labels them “financially closed” or having a $0.00 remaining balance.
In their letter to Zeldin, Senate Democrats asserted Congress’ power over the federal purse, noting that the law specifically “directed the EPA to distribute $3 billion to improve environmental protection in communities facing economic hardship.” An internal email from the EPA’s general counsel notes that some of the grants were terminated on the basis that they funded DEI or environmental justice initiatives that “conflict with the Agency’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in performing our statutory functions.” The senators’ letter argues quite the opposite — that these grants were meant to ensure a healthy environment for all Americans.
Secondly, they write that “any attempt to withhold these funds violates the Impoundment Control Act.” That’s a reference to a 1974 law that prohibits the executive branch from holding back congressionally appropriated funds without permission from Congress. The letter also admonishes Zeldin for violating federal court injunctions on President Trump’s funding freeze.
Lastly, the senators accuse the agency of knowingly violating the terms of its own contracts, citing an internal email from EPA’s Office of General Counsel which admits as much. The email acknowledges that many of the cancellation letters sent to grantees cited grounds for termination that were not valid under the grant contracts. At this, the Office of General Counsel essentially shrugs, noting that “no decision to retract the terminations is forthcoming,” and that grantees can dispute the decision or sue the agency if they want to.
The letter includes a series of 12 questions for the EPA, including requests for every termination letter sent to grantees and an explanation of what the agency plans to do with “the alleged $2 billion in federal funds ‘saved’ by EPA and DOGE grant terminations.”
In a statement to the Associated Press, the EPA confirmed that it received the letter, but that it has no plans to stop canceling grants. “As the Trump administration reins in wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars, EPA will continue terminating assistance agreements in line with terms and conditions,” the statement said.
Here is the full list of canceled grants released by the senators, published for the first time in a searchable, sortable format:
On skirting pollution rules, Arctic sea ice, and Empire Wind
Current conditions: Between 10 and 15 inches of rain fell across parts of South Texas, triggering severe flooding • Firefighters made progress containing some of the large wildfires burning in South Korea • It’s -7 degrees Fahrenheit at Greenland’s Pituffik Space Base, which Vice President JD Vance will visit today.
The Environmental Protection Agency has set up an email address that power plants and other industrial facilities can use to request a temporary exemption from President Trump on EPA air pollution rules. Firms can write to “airaction@epa.gov” and make a case for why their facilities should not have to abide by some nine Clean Air Act emissions rules, and for how long they’d like to be exempt. The president — yes, the president himself — will review the request and “make a decision on the merits.” The EPA argues that the Clean Air Act contains a section that allows the president to exempt industrial facilities from new rules for up to two years “if the technology to implement the standard is not available and it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.”
The environmental protection community is not happy. “The new Trump EPA website invites hundreds of industrial sources of cancer-causing pollution and other toxics to evade science-based clean air standards that are designed to keep our families safe — all with a single email,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund. “This puts the health of all Americans on the line.”
Sea ice in the Arctic is at its lowest winter level ever recorded. March is usually when the ice is at its peak, but this year’s ice cover of 5.53 million square miles is about 30,000 square miles smaller than the previous lowest March peak recorded in 2017. “Warming temperatures are what’s causing the ice to decline,” ice data scientist Walt Meier told The Associated Press. The Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the world, and less winter sea ice means more melt in the summer. Researchers warn that current warming trends mean the Arctic could see its first completely ice-free summer months as soon as 2035. “We’re going to come into this next summer season with less ice to begin with,” said Linette Boisvert, an ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It doesn’t bode well for the future.”
Activists from the anti-wind movement are circling Empire Wind and asking President Donald Trump to rescind the EPA air permit to the Equinor offshore project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. Two prominent anti-offshore wind organizations — Save the East Coast and Protect our Coast-Long Island — announced this week in a press release posted to Facebook that they were petitioning the EPA to take the permit away, just like it did earlier this month with the Atlantic Shores project off the coast of New Jersey. Activists have also asked EPA to get rid of air permits for New England Wind and Vineyard Wind.
Earnings call mentions of “climate change” and other terms related to environmental issues and clean energy have plummeted by 76% over the past three years, according to a new Bloomberg analysis. “Green chatter” on S&P 500 companies’ quarterly calls peaked in 2022, just before the Inflation Reduction Act passed, and has been falling ever since. Anti-climate sentiment in the Trump administration has hastened the so-called greenhushing. At the same time, most corporate finance bosses say they aim to increase their green investments, and more companies are making climate commitments. So some progress is still being made, even if nobody wants to make a big deal out of it.
The Internal Revenue Service this week reopened the online portal for car dealerships to retroactively register electric vehicle sales to the tax agency, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported. The change will make it easier for buyers to claim the EV tax credit on their returns after a major change to the EV tax credit program last year left many in the lurch. Before the change, all dealers had to do was give the buyer a “time of sale” report that they could submit to the IRS come tax season. But as of 2024, dealerships were expected to register every EV sale that was eligible for the tax credit through this new online portal. Not only that, they had to do so within three days of the sale. The portal would not allow entries dated more than three days post-sale. Many dealerships were unaware of the new requirements, and customers trying to claim the credit on their taxes have been getting error messages saying that their EVs were not registered with the IRS. In a notice to dealerships this week, first reported by NPR, the trade group said the IRS planned to roll out an update to the portal on Wednesday to allow for sales made in 2024 to be submitted.
“If any of this has made you nervous about getting an EV this year, remember that you have another, safer option for claiming the tax credit,” Pontecorvo explains. “Instead of claiming it on your taxes in 2026, you can transfer it to your dealer, who can take it off the sale price of the car on the spot. Just make sure they know about the online portal!”
“Perfectly executed, Mr. Trump! … You have pulled off the rare rope-a-dope: Your political action groups raised more than $75 million from the oil industry to help get you elected. But now that you’re in office, you’re shutting them in. And the best part is that voters have no idea: Americans continue to think that you support U.S. oil and gas drilling — and they like it.”
–Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer in an open letter to President Trump, aka Degrowth Donald
