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Your guide to the important races from Alaska to Arizona and everywhere in between.
In 2015, just one state had a goal of reaching 100% clean energy; today, over half the American population lives in states that do. That progress is thanks in large part to voters, who’ve prioritized electing candidates that support renewable energy, electric vehicles, climate justice, and other green policies.
And who’s making those policies? The people at the bottom of the ticket — candidates for the kind of local and state-level offices that do most of the nitty-gritty climate policymaking in this country. Here is a representative, albeit far from exhaustive, list of eight I’ll be keeping my eye on this year.
Who’s running: There are 10 candidates in Anchorage’s nonpartisan mayoral election, but the ones you need to know are Republican incumbent Mayor David Bronson; Democratic Party-endorsed Suzanne LaFrance, who helped pass the city’s Climate Action Plan while in the State Assembly; former state legislator and Democratic Party-endorsed Chris Tuck; and the Republican Party-endorsed former president and CEO of the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation Bill Popp.
State of the race: Bronson led with 35% of the vote in polls a month out from election day on April 2, but that wouldn’t put him over the 45% hump he needs to win without a runoff. LaFrance holds around 25% of the potential vote, and experts say she’d likely beat Bronson if it goes to a runoff.
Why it matters: Southcentral Alaska, home to half the state’s population, gets most of its energy from wells owned by Hilcorp in Cook Inlet. Hilcorp, however, has warned that it won’t commit to signing new contracts, which begin to expire next year, due to natural gas shortages. Mayors in the region, including Anchorage’s Bronson, recently formed a coalition to address the looming energy crisis, with solutions ranging from importing liquified natural gas from out of state, abroad, or Alaska’s North Slope 800 miles away; to new drilling (Bronson’s proposal); to finding an “alternative” source of energy (LaFrance’s stance). Whatever way you cut it, though, the next mayor of Anchorage is likely to have an outsized role in determining the state’s energy future, with organizations like The Alaska Center, which advocates for renewable energy, and Lead Locally, which champions climate leaders, rallying behind LaFrance.
Who’s running: Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego and “MAGA darling” Kari Lake are fighting for outgoing Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s seat.
State of the race: It’s a true toss-up, although early polls show Gallego with the edge.
Why it matters: Sinema’s replacement could determine which party controls the Senate once the dust settles on November 5. In one corner is Lake, who has blamed heat-related deaths in the state on meth and, while “not opposed to some of the green energy,” has said she’d block renewable mandates. Gallego, by contrast, is endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund in part for having paid special attention to public lands and waters and clean energy jobs while in Congress. He also co-sponsored the CHIPS and Science Act.
What it is: The Salt River Project is the biggest public power company in the country by generation, serving the Phoenix metropolitan area. Its board and council are chosen through a confusing and dubiously democratic “acreage-based voting system” on the first Tuesday in April in even-numbered years.
State of the race: A coalition of 14 clean energy candidates is attempting to flip the SRP board and council to make it more solar-friendly. However, only half of SRP’s customers are eligible to cast a vote — renters, for example, are not allowed — and less than 1% of those who are eligible actually do.
Why it matters: Currently, less than 4% of SRP’s energy comes from solar, compared to almost 10% for other local utilities. Incumbents on the council and board — some of whom have had SRP seats in their families for more than a century — have voted to keep using coal and penalized rooftop solar, with six-time elected official Stephen Williams telling the local NBC affiliate that the “sun doesn’t shine at night” — which, while true, does not typically prohibit solar energy from being generated during the daytime. In addition to pushing for more solar, the Clean Energy candidates also want to protect the local watershed, an issue likely to become increasingly critical in the heat-baked state.
What it is: A vote on whether or not to overturn Senate Bill 1137, which prohibits new oil and gas wells from being built within a half-mile of homes, schools, nursing homes, jails, and hospitals, and requires additional safety measures like leak detection.
State of the race: Big-money campaigns have killed progressive bills in California before, and the oil industry is poised to dump a lot more money into defeating the regulations. The campaign to overturn Senate Bill 1137 has already spent $20 million, while California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and Jane Fonda have rallied to support the bill.
Why it matters: The California referendum is set to be one of a handful of cases of voters deciding directly on legislation related to oil, gas, and emissions this November. Oil interests are already tailoring their arguments to sway California’s liberal constituency, arguing that the law’s limits are arbitrary and that it will be worse for the environment in the long run by forcing the state to import oil from places with less stringent regulations. Proponents of the bill, however, say it is a cut-and-dry case of environmental justice, given that many of the more than 2 million Californians who live within a mile of an oil or gas well in the state are people of color. That hasn’t stopped oil interests from undertaking some confusing shenanigans, even as some experts say gas interests just want the referendum to cause a delay “until they figure out what they’re going to do next.”
Who’s running: Former Democratic State Senator Curtis Hertel Jr., who is endorsed by the LCV, is running against former Republican State Senator Tom Barrett.
State of the race: The Cook Political Reporthas called Michigan’s 7th district, representing Lansing and the surrounding area, “the most competitive open seat in the country.”
Why it matters: “Climate won the Michigan midterms,” the Sierra Club wrote in 2022 after voters elected a “pro-environment majority” to the state legislature. Having control of both chambers allowed Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer to make speedy and impressive progress on the energy transition locally, while at the national level, Democrats took seven of the state’s 13 House seats. The advantages are slim, though, and going into November, Congressional Democrats face threats in MI-03, MI-08, and most notably, MI-07, which Democratic Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin has vacated to run for Senate. Notably, Democrats need to win five more House districts nationally to regain control of the chamber, which means every close district race is essential. It’s important locally, too; the race for Slotkin’s open seat is among the most competitive in the country, and green groups have hit Barrett for his poor environmental voting record and opposition to clean energy jobs.
Who’s running: Incumbent Democrat Jon Tester will face the winner of the Republican primary — likely former Montana Secretary of State and Public Service Commission Chair Brad Johnson, a Libertarian, or ex-Navy SEAL and entrepreneur Tim Sheehy, who was endorsed by Trump as an “American hero.”
State of the race:It’ll be a nail-biter. Tester “will likely have to convince one out of every six Trump voters to cross over for him” on a split ballot in November, RealClearPoliticsnotes. Still, polls show the Democrat with an early edge in potential Republican match-ups.
Why it matters: Unlike Arizona, which has turned purple in the last two elections, Montana is still a solidly conservative state, which Trump won by more than 16 points in 2020. At the same time, Montana is becoming a “must-watch climate battleground,” balanced between its cheap and ample supply of coal and its deep-rooted pride in its natural landscape. But while Tester’s environmental record isn’t perfect, the opposition looks much worse: Johnson has scaremongered about the reliability of renewable energy and EVs stressing the grid, while Sheehy quietly deleted references to sustainability and climate change from the website for his aerial firefighting company, seemingly to boost his credibility with MAGA voters.
Who’s running: North Carolina’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein will face the state’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, Mark K. Robinson.
State of the race: Either a toss-up or a slight lean Democratic, depending on who you ask. Early polls show Stein and Robinson neck and neck.
Why it matters: When I spoke to LCV’s senior vice president of campaigns, Pete Maysmith, he cited the North Carolina race as one of the advocacy group’s top 2024 priorities. Term-limited outgoing Democratic Governor Roy Cooper had long been an ally of green policymakers, setting strong EV goals for the state and making a (thwarted) push for offshore wind. Stein has vowed to keep up his predecessor’s work. Robinson, on the other hand, is one of the most flagrant deniers of climate change on any 2024 ballot: He’s called climate research “junk science” and misleadingly alleged there are “more polar bears on Earth now than ever.” Electing Stein wouldn’t just keep a climate denier out of office; with Cooper’s seat, Republicans could seize a trifecta in the state if, as expected, they keep control of the House and Senate. With no remaining opposition, they could start rolling back more of Cooper’s work.
Who’s running: There are currently 13 candidates in the nonpartisan primary for outgoing Governor Jay Inslee’s seat, but leading the polls are Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat endorsed by Inslee; moderate Democratic State Senator Mark Mullet; former moderate Republican Representative Dave Reichert; and former Richland school board member Semi Bird, the first Black Republican to run for governor in the state.
State of the race: Likely Democrat; the state last elected a Republican governor in 1985. Still, a November poll that pitted Ferguson against Reichert showed the Republican with a 2-point lead over his opponent.
Why it matters: Inslee’s apparent departure from politics will leave a gaping hole not just in the state’s climate leadership but also in the nation’s — as governor, Inslee made Washington an example for other states with its aggressive clean energy goals, phase-out of new gas-powered cars and trucks, heat pump requirement for new buildings, and local Climate Corps. That progressive trajectory is under threat from Republicans, who’ve successfully gathered signatures for potential initiatives that would chip away at “radical” policies like the state’s cap-and-invest program — a repeal of which both Reichert and Bird support. But Washington’s governor race could be consequential even if a Democrat wins. While Ferguson has called “climate change” a top priority and under Inslee opposed building a methane gas pipeline through the state, Mullet has taken a somewhat more moderate stance, expressing concerns about gas “affordability” for families.
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And for his energy czar, Doug Burgum.
When Trump enters the Oval Office again in January, there are some climate change-related programs he could roll back or revise immediately, some that could take years to dismantle, and some that may well be beyond his reach. And then there’s carbon capture and storage.
For all the new regulations and funding the Biden administration issued to reduce emissions and advance the clean energy economy over the past four years, it did little to update the regulatory environment for carbon capture and storage. The Treasury Department never clarified how the changes to the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture under the Inflation Reduction Act affect eligibility. The Department of Transportation has not published its proposal for new safety rules for pipelines that transport carbon dioxide. And the Environmental Protection Agency has yet to determine whether it will give Texas permission to regulate its own carbon dioxide storage wells, a scenario that some of the state’s own representatives advise against.
That means, as the BloombergNEF policy associate Derrick Flakoll put it in an analysis published prior to the election, “the next administration and Congress will encounter a blank canvas of carbon capture infrastructure rules they can shape freely.”
Carbon capture is unique among climate technologies because it is, in most cases, a pure cost with no monetizable benefit. That means the policy environment — that great big blank canvas — is essential to determining which projects actually get built and whether the ones that do are actually useful for fighting climate change.
The next administration may or may not decide to take an interest in carbon capture, of course, but there’s reason to expect it will. Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick for the Department of the Interior who will also head up a new National Energy Council, has been a vocal supporter of carbon capture projects in his home state of North Dakota. Although Trump’s team will be looking for subsidies to cut in order to offset the tax breaks he has promised, his deep-pocketed supporters in the oil and gas industry who have made major investments in carbon capture based, in part, on the 45Q tax credit, will not want to see it on the chopping block. And carbon capture typically enjoys bipartisan support in Congress.
Congress first created the carbon capture tax credit in 2008, under the auspices of cleaning up the image of coal plants. Lawmakers updated the credit in 2018, and then again in 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act, each iteration increasing the credit amount and expanding the types of projects that are eligible. Companies can now get up to $85 for every ton of CO2 captured from an industrial plant and sequestered underground, and $180 for every ton captured directly from the air. Combined with grants and loans in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the changes have driven a surge in carbon capture and storage projects in the United States. More than 150 projects have been announced since the start of 2022, according to a database maintained by the International Energy Agency, compared to fewer than 100 over the four years prior.
Many of these projects are notably different from what has been proposed and tried in the past. Historically in the U.S., carbon capture has been used on coal-fired power plants, ethanol refineries, and at natural gas processing facilities, and almost all of the captured gas has been pumped into aging oil fields to help push more fuel out of the ground. But the new policy environment spurred at least some proposals in industries with few other options to decarbonize, including cement, hydrogen, and steel production. It also catalyzed projects that suck carbon directly from the air, versus capturing emissions at the source. Most developers now say they plan to sequester captured carbon underground rather than use it to drill for oil.
Only a handful of projects are actually under construction, however, and the prospects for others reaching that point are far from guaranteed. Inflation has eroded the value of the 45Q tax credit, Madelyn Morrison, the government affairs director for the Carbon Capture Coalition, told me. “Coupled with that, project deployment costs have really skyrocketed over the past several years. Some folks have said that equipment costs have gone up upwards of 50%,” she said.
Others aren’t sure whether they’ll even qualify, Flakoll told me. “There is a sort of shadow struggle going on over how permissive the credit is going to be in practice,” he said. For example, the IRA says that power plants have to capture 75% of their baseline emissions to be eligible, but it doesn’t specify how to calculate those baseline emissions. The Treasury solicited input on these questions and others shortly after the IRA passed. Comments raised concerns about how projects that share pipeline infrastructure should track and report their carbon sequestration claims. Environmental groups sought updates to the reporting and verification requirements to prevent taxpayer money from funding false or inflated claims. A 2020 investigation by the inspector general for tax administration found that during the first decade of the program, nearly $900 billion in tax credits were claimed for projects that did not comply with EPA reporting requirements. But the Treasury never followed up its request for comment with a proposed rule.
Permitting for carbon sequestration sites has also lagged. The Environmental Protection Agency has issued final permits for just one carbon sequestration project over the past four years, with a total of two wells. Fifty-five applications are currently under review.
Carbon dioxide pipeline projects have also faced opposition from local governments and landowners. In California, where lawmakers have generally supported the use of carbon capture for achieving state climate goals, and where more than a dozen projects have been announced, the legislature placed a moratorium on CO2 pipeline development until the federal government updates its safety regulations.
The incoming Congress and presidential administration could clear away some of these hurdles. Congress is already expected to get rid of or rewrite many of the IRA’s tax credit programs when it opens the tax code to address other provisions that expire next year. The Carbon Capture Coalition and other proponents are advocating for another increase to the value of the 45Q tax credit to adjust it for inflation. Trump’s Treasury department will have free rein to issue rules that make the credit as cheap and easy as possible to claim. The EPA, under new leadership, could also speed up carbon storage permitting or, perhaps more likely, grant primacy over permitting to the states.
But other Trump administration priorities could end up hurting carbon capture development. The projects with the surest path forward are the ones with the lowest cost of capture and multiple pathways for revenue generation, Rohan Dighe, a research analyst at Wood Mackenzie told me. For example, ethanol plants emit a relatively pure stream of CO2 that’s easy to capture, and doing so enables producers to access low-carbon fuel markets in California and Washington. Carbon capture at a steel plant or power plant is much more difficult, by contrast, as the flue gas contains a mix of pollutants.
On those facilities, the 45Q tax credit is too low to justify the cost, Dighe said, and other sources of revenue such as price premiums for green products are uncertain. “The Trump administration's been pretty clear in terms of wanting to deregulate, broadly speaking,” Dighe said, pointing to plans to axe the EPA’s power plant rules and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate disclosure requirements. “So those sorts of drivers for some of these projects moving forward are going to be removed.”
That means projects will depend more on voluntary corporate sustainability initiatives to justify investment. Does Amazon want to build a data center in West Texas? Is it willing to pay a premium for clean electricity from a natural gas plant that captures and stores its carbon?
But the regulatory environment still matters. Flakoll will be watching to see whether lax monitoring and reporting rules for carbon capture, if enacted, will hurt trust and acceptance of carbon capture projects to the point that companies find it difficult to find buyers for their products or insurance companies to underwrite them.
“There will be a more of a policy push for [CCS] to enter the market,” Flakoll said. “But it takes two to tango, and there's a question of how much the private sector will respond to that.”
What he wants them to do is one thing. What they’ll actually do is far less certain.
Donald Trump believes that tariffs have almost magical power to bring prosperity; as he said last month, “To me, the world’s most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariffs. It’s my favorite word.” In case anyone doubted his sincerity, before Thanksgiving he announced his intention to impose 25% tariffs on everything coming from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods.
This is just the beginning. If the trade war he launched in his first term was haphazard and accomplished very little except costing Americans money, in his second term he plans to go much further. And the effects of these on clean energy and climate change will be anything but straightforward.
The theory behind tariffs is that by raising the price of an imported good, they give a stronger footing in the market; eventually, the domestic producer may no longer need the tariff to be competitive. Imposing a tariff means we’ve decided that a particular industry is important enough that it needs this kind of support — or as some might call it, protection — even if it means higher prices for a while.
The problem with across-the-board tariffs of the kind Trump proposes is that they create higher prices even for goods that are not being produced domestically and probably never will be. If tariffs raise the price of a six-pack of tube socks at Target from $9.99 to $14.99, it won’t mean we’ll start making tube socks in America again. It just means you’ll pay more. The same is often true for domestic industries that use foreign parts in their manufacturing: If no one is producing those parts domestically, their costs will unavoidably rise.
The U.S. imported over $3 trillion worth of goods in 2023, and $426 billion from China alone, so Trump’s proposed tariffs would represent hundreds of billions of dollars of increased costs. That’s before we account for the inevitable retaliatory tariffs, which is what we saw in Trump’s first term: He imposed tariffs on China, which responded by choking off its imports of American agricultural goods. In the end, the revenue collected from Trump’s tariffs went almost entirely to bailing out farmers whose export income disappeared.
The past almost-four years under Joe Biden have seen a series of back-and-forth moves in which new tariffs were announced, other tariffs were increased, exemptions were removed and reinstated. For instance, this May Biden increased the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles to over 100% while adding tariffs on certain EV batteries. But some of the provisions didn’t take effect right away, and only certain products were affected, so the net economic impact was minimal. And there’s been nothing like an across-the-board tariff.
It’s reasonable to criticize Biden’s tariff policies related to climate. But his administration was trying to navigate a dilemma, serving two goals at once: reducing emissions and promoting the development of domestic clean energy technology. Those goals are not always in alignment, at least in the short run, which we can see in the conflict within the solar industry. Companies that sell and install solar equipment benefit from cheap Chinese imports and therefore oppose tariffs, while domestic manufacturers want the tariffs to continue so they can be more competitive. The administration has attempted to accommodate both interests with a combination of subsidies to manufacturers and tariffs on certain kinds of imports — with exemptions peppered here and there. It’s been a difficult balancing act.
Then there are electric vehicles. The world’s largest EV manufacturer is Chinese company BYD, but if you haven’t seen any of their cars on the road, it’s because existing tariffs make it virtually impossible to import Chinese EVs to the United States. That will continue to be the case under Trump, and it would have been the case if Kamala Harris had been elected.
On one hand, it’s important for America to have the strongest possible green industries to insulate us from future supply shocks and create as many jobs-of-the-future as possible. On the other hand, that isn’t necessarily the fastest route to emissions reductions. In a world where we’ve eliminated all tariffs on EVs, the U.S. market would be flooded with inexpensive, high-quality Chinese EVs. That would dramatically accelerate adoption, which would be good for the climate.
But that would also deal a crushing blow to the American car industry, which is why neither party will allow it. What may happen, though, is that Chinese car companies may build factories in Mexico, or even here in the U.S., just as many European and Japanese companies have, so that their cars wouldn’t be subject to tariffs. That will take time.
Of course, whatever happens will depend on Trump following through with his tariff promise. We’ve seen before how he declares victory even when he only does part of what he promised, which could happen here. Once he begins implementing his tariffs, his administration will be immediately besieged by a thousand industries demanding exemptions, carve-outs, and delays in the tariffs that affect them. Many will have powerful advocates — members of Congress, big donors, and large groups of constituents — behind them. It’s easy to imagine how “across-the-board” tariffs could, in practice, turn into Swiss cheese.
There’s no way to know yet which parts of the energy transition will be in the cheese, and which parts will be in the holes. The manufacturers can say that helping them will stick it to China; the installers may not get as friendly an audience with Trump and his team. And the EV tariffs certainly aren’t going anywhere.
There’s a great deal of uncertainty, but one thing is clear: This is a fight that will continue for the entirety of Trump’s term, and beyond.
Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.