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From the national to the state to the local level, the state is about to hold some of the country’s most crucial elections.
In 2022, the Arizona Republic published a sentence many Democrats had dreamed of reading for decades: “Arizona,” the paper announced, “is a blue state.”
At the time, it felt true. In 2020, Joe Biden won the Grand Canyon State — only the second time a Democrat had done so since Arizona broke for Harry Truman in 1952 — and Democrat Mark Kelly defeated Republican Sen. Martha McSally in a special election to fill the late John McCain’s Senate seat, a victory that helped the Inflation Reduction Act get over the finish line. The 2022 midterm elections confirmed that the Democrats’ wins in the state hadn’t just been a one-time occurrence: Kelly successfully defended his seat, securing a full term; Katie Hobbs won the governorship; and Adrian Fontes beat a January 6 participant to become the secretary of state, Democrats all.
With the 2024 election still a little more than a week away, it’s too soon to tell whether the blue state proclamations of 2022 were premature. But Arizona hasn’t been looking terribly cerulean. In 2023, the Republican-held state legislature passed eight of 16 anti-environment bills introduced and stranded 22 pro-environment bills without committee hearings. Republican voter registration in the state has also swelled since 2016 as Democratic rolls stayed relatively stagnant, giving the GOP an edge in a place where 10,457 votes can make all the difference.
Arizona is just one state out of 50 (or 11 electoral votes out of 538, if you prefer), but it represents a curious microcosm of the high-stakes climate and energy elections happening all over the country this November. Or perhaps it is not so curious: Arizona is on the front lines of the climate-related impacts of droughts, longer and nastier heat waves, ozone pollution, and wildfires, while also being in a position to weigh the trade-offs of crucial clean energy developments like building new energy transmission, critical mineral mining, and utility-scale solar. “It’s like an incubator. There’s just so much happening here, it’s ready to burst,” Jane Conlin, a co-leader of the Tucson chapter of the Citizens' Climate Lobby, which has been engaging in get-out-the-vote efforts with the Environmental Voter Project, told me.
Aside from its electoral college allocations, the most consequential race in Arizona this cycle will be for outgoing Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s seat. The state is currently leaning slightly toward Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego, who could help stem a total hemorrhaging of blue seats from the Senate — which, in turn, would have implications for the passage of any decarbonization legislation in the next administration.
Two U.S. House elections in Arizona could similarly help determine the balance of power on Capitol Hill come January. AZ-01 is the wealthiest congressional district in the state, in the northeastern corner of Phoenix’s Maricopa County, where a former E.R. doctor is trying to unseat a seven-term Republican incumbent in a battle that has centered on abortion access. (The district is also home to the Rio Verde Foothills, which made national headlines in 2022 when Scottsdale cut off its water supply due to drought-related shortages.)
But it’s the other race, in the sixth congressional district spanning the suburbs of Tucson, that looks more like a proxy battle between different climate ideologies. Kirsten Engel — who previously worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and serves as the co-director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Arizona — is challenging Juan Ciscomani, a Trump-endorsed moderate conservative who has backed residential solar projects, promoted himself as an advocate for a “secure water future,”and, earlier this year, co-sponsored a bill seen as a first step toward a carbon border tax. (As his opponents quickly point out, he also voted against the IRA; Ciscomani has also been tied to a groundwater scandal involving a Saudi Arabian-owned alfalfa farm.)
Engel previously lost a tight election against Ciscomani in 2022, and has made abortion a centerpiece of her campaign, too. But she has also gone aggressively after the Republican for his alignment with the mining industry, including his support for a proposed open-pit copper mine that opponents say will pollute Tucson’s air and waterways; supporters, meanwhile, say it’s critical to create a domestic supply chain for the energy transition. The League of Conservation Voters, which identified the sixth congressional district election as one of its priority races, is running ads in the state playing up this pollution angle.
Engel herself has slammed the proposed mine, which would be built on public lands, as a “giveaway” to a foreign mining company, and touted the need to protect the region’s “spectacular scenic vistas and the tourism economy.” She has also sought to go toe-to-toe with Ciscomani on water conservation, though as Grist has reported, drought and water rights can be tricky for Arizona politicians to run on because voters don’t have a firm grasp of how the complicated policies work.
The future of climate policy at the regional and municipal levels in Arizona is also in play. Democrats could potentially flip the balance of power in the state House and Senate, each branch currently having just a one-seat Republican advantage, and restart movement on the slate of stalled pro-environmental bills. (The Democratic governor’s term runs through 2026.) “The state legislature in Arizona is so critical,” John Qua, the campaign manager of Lead Locally, told me. “Not only does building a democratic trifecta get the state closer to passing policy that tackles climate change in some of the ways we might more typically understand it — like moving towards clean energy — but it also makes it much likelier that the state legislature will pass water conservation policy.”
The 11 races are “all at a razor-thin margin,” Qua told me, though climate is unlikely to be the issue that tips the balance in any of them. That goes for just about any race in Arizona — except the state’s Corporation Commission, which Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo covered earlier this week. Currently, the ACC is operating with a four-to-one Republican majority, but with three Democrats, two Green party candidates, and three Republicans (including an incumbent) running to fill three seats, there’s a wide-open chance that candidates sympathetic to clean energy policy, including the state’s massive solar opportunity, could take control.
“Arizona could lead the world in solar power if politicians would only let it,” Nathaniel Stinnett, the founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project, told me. “But that isn’t going to happen unless the climate movement starts showing up in unstoppable numbers whenever there’s an election.”
Conlin, who co-leads the Tucson chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, has been working on the ground to reach the 230,000 potential first-time environmental voters that Stinnett and his team have identified in the state. (EVP numbers released earlier this week showed that those who vote based on climate issues were about 20% more likely to have submitted an early vote than the average voter.) During a recent folklife festival CCL volunteers attended, “I think about only 25% of people [we engaged with] were really aware of the Arizona Corporation Commission,” Conlin told me. But she’s excited nevertheless: This year, the ACC poll is on the front of Arizonans’ ballots, rather than the back, making it harder for even low-information voters to overlook.
The state is also a case study of how an elected body as small and seemingly insignificant as a school board can make a difference in the progress toward decarbonization. The Tucson Unified School District board of governors will vote next week on a climate action plan that would set a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2045. If successful, TUSD would be one of the first school districts in the nation to have implemented such a plan.
Arizona is not the only state in the country that, as Colin put it, feels “on this cusp of being able to reach out — not only to see a 50% cut in emissions but 100%. It’s doable, it’s within reach.” Pennsylvania and Michigan voters will also have opportunities to elect politicians who will advance climate legislation, and voters in Washington, California, and New York can defend their states’ progress. But it’s Arizona where the stakes seem especially immediate — and high. “It’s supposed to be 96 [degrees Fahrenheit] here today,” Conlin marveled when we spoke this week, at the end of October.
I could hear the weariness in the voices of the organizers I spoke to after a long, hard-fought season; candidates are set to make their final pitches to voters next week. Early-voting ballots are already in the mail or in hand. The CCL has just one final day of canvassing planned, on November 2. The polls will close three days later, at 7 p.m. local time, and then the count will begin.
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On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
And how ordinary Americans will pay the price.
No one seems to know exactly how many employees have been laid off from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or, for that matter, what offices those employees worked at, what jobs they held, or what regions of the country will be impacted by their absence. We do know that it was a lot of people; about 10% of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at the agency have left since Donald Trump took office, either because they were among the 800 or so probationary employees to be fired late last month or because they resigned.
“I don’t have the specifics as to which offices, or how many people from specific geographic areas, but I will reiterate that every one of the six [NOAA] line offices and 11 of the staff offices — think of the General Counsel’s Office or the Legislative Affairs Office — all 11 of those staff offices have suffered terminations,” Rick Spinrad, who served as the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told reporters in a late February press call. (At least a few of the NOAA employees who were laid off have since been brought back.)
Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in recent comments about the NOAA layoffs, “This is going to have profound negative consequences on the day-to-day lives of Americans.” He added, “This is something that [Elon Musk’s government efficiency team] just doesn’t even understand. They simply have no idea what they are doing and how it’s hurting people.”
There is the direct harm to hard-working employees who have lost their jobs, of course. But there is also a more existential problem: Part of what is driving the layoffs is a belief by those in power that the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” according to the Project 2025 playbook. As one recently fired NOAA employee put it, “the goal is destruction,” and climate science is one of the explicit targets.
NOAA is a multifaceted organization, and monitoring climate change is far from its only responsibility. The agency researches, protects, and restores America’s fisheries, including through an enforcement arm that combats poaching; it explores the deep ocean and governs seabed mining; and its Commissioned Officer Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, alongside the Army, Marines Corps, and Coast Guard. But many of its well-known responsibilities almost inevitably touch climate change, from the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts and warnings to drought tools for farmers to heat forecasts from the National Weather Service issued on hot summer days. Cutting climate science out of NOAA would have immediate — and in some cases, deadly — impacts on regular Americans.
And it’s likely this is only the beginning of the purge. Project 2025 calls for the complete disbanding of NOAA. Current agency employees have reportedly been told to brace for “a 50% reduction in staff” as part of Elon Musk’s government efficiency campaign. Another 1,000 terminations are expected this week, bringing the total loss at NOAA to around 20% of its staff.
Here are just a few of the ways those layoffs are already impacting climate science.
NOAA collects more than 20 terabytes of environmental data from Earth and space daily, and through its paleoclimatology arm, it has reconstructed climate data going back 100 million years. Not even Project 2025 calls for the U.S. to halt its weather measurements entirely; in fact, Congress requires the collection of a lot of standard climate data.
But the NOAA layoffs are hampering those data collection efforts, introducing gaps and inconsistencies. For example, staffing shortages have resulted in the National Weather Service suspending weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska — and elsewhere — “indefinitely.” The Trump administration is also considering shuttering a number of government offices, including several of NOAA’s weather monitoring stations. Repairs of monitors and sensors could also be delayed by staff cuts and funding shortfalls — or not done at all.
Flawed and incomplete data results in degraded and imprecise forecasts. In an era of extreme weather, the difference of a few miles or degrees can be a matter of life or death.
In the case of climate science specifically, which looks at changes over much longer timescales than meteorology, “I think you could do science with the data we have now, if we can preserve it,” Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at Cornell University who uses NOAA data in his research, told me.
But therein lies the next problem: the threat that the government could take NOAA climate data down entirely.
Though data collection is in many cases mandated by Congress, Congress does not require that the public have access to that data. Though NOAA’s climate page is still live, the Environmental Protection Agency has already removed from its website the Keeling Curve tracker, the daily global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurement that Drilled notes is “one of the longest-running data projects in climate science.” Many other government websites that reference climate change have also gone dark. Solutions are complicated — “downloading” NOAA to preserve it, for example, would cost an estimated $500,000 in storage per month for an institution to host it.
“At the end of the day, if you’re a municipality or a community and you realize that some of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, you’ll want to adapt to it, whether you think it’s because of climate change or not,” Lehner said. “People want to have the best available science to adapt, and I think that applies to Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of communities across the country.” But if the Trump administration deletes NOAA websites, or the existing measurements it’s putting out are of poor quality, “it’s not going to be the best possible science to adapt moving forward,” Lehner added.
I wouldn’t want to be a NOAA scientist with the word “climate” attached to my title or work. The Trump administration has shown itself to be ruthless in eliminating references to words or concepts it opposes, including flagging pictures of the Enola Gay WWII airplane for removal from the Defense Department’s website in an effort to cut all references to the LGBT community from the agency.
“Climate science” is another Trump administration boogey-word, but the NOAA scientists who remain employed by the agency after the layoffs will still have to deal with the realities of a world warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. “Ultimately, what we’re dealing with are changes in our environment that impact ecosystems and humans, and whether you think these changes are driven by humans or not, it’s something that can now be seen in data,” Lehner told me. “From that perspective, I find it hard to believe that this is not something that people [in the government] are interested in researching.”
Government scientists who want to track things like drought or the rapid intensification of hurricanes going forward will likely have to do so without using the word “climate.” Lehner, for example, recalled submitting a proposal to work with the Bureau of Reclamation on the climate change effects on the Colorado River during the first Trump administration and being advised to replace words like “climate change” with more politically neutral language. His team did, and the project ultimately got funded, though Lehner couldn’t say if that was only because of the semantics. It seems likely, though, that Trump 2.0 will be even stricter in CTRL + F’ing “climate” at NOAA and elsewhere.
Climate research will continue in some form at NOAA, if only because that’s the reality of working with data of a warming planet. But scientists who don’t lose their jobs in the layoffs will likely find themselves wasting time on careful doublespeak so as not to attract unwanted attention.
Another major concern with the NOAA layoffs is the loss of expert knowledge. Many NOAA offices were already lean and understaffed, and only one or two employees likely knew how to perform certain tasks or use certain programs. If those experts subsequently lose their jobs, decades of NOAA know-how will be lost entirely.
As one example, late last year, NOAA updated its system to process grants, causing delays as its staff learned how to use the new program. Given the new round of layoffs, the odds are that some of the employees who may have finally figured out how to navigate the new procedure may have been let go. The problem gets even worse when it comes to specialized knowledge.
“Some of the expertise in processing [NOAA’s] data has been abruptly lost,” Lehner told me. “The people who are still there are scrambling to pick up and learn how to process that data so that it can then be used again.”
The worst outcome of the NOAA layoffs, though, is the extensive damage it does to the institution’s future. Some of the brightest, most enthusiastic Americans at NOAA — the probationary employees with under a year of work — are already gone. What’s more, there aren’t likely to be many new openings at the agency for the next generation of talent coming up in high school and college right now.
“We have an atmospheric science program [at Cornell University] where students have secured NOAA internships for this summer and were hoping to have productive careers, for example, at the National Weather Service, and so forth,” Lehner said. “Now, all of this is in question.”
That is hugely detrimental to NOAA’s ability to preserve the institutional knowledge of outgoing or retiring employees, or to build and advance a workforce of the future. It’s impossible to measure how many people ultimately leave the field or decide to pursue a different career because of the changes at NOAA — damage that will not be easily reversed under a new administration. “It’s going to take years for NOAA to recover the trust of the next generation of brilliant environmental scientists and policymakers,” Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, said.
Climate change is a global problem, and NOAA has historically worked with partner agencies around the world to better understand the impacts of the warming planet. Now, however, the Trump administration has ordered NOAA employees to stop their international work, and employees who held roles that involved collaboration with partners abroad could potentially become targets of Musk’s layoffs. Firing those employees would also mean severing their relationships with scientists in international offices — offices that very well could have been in positions to help protect U.S. citizens with their research and data.
As the U.S. continues to isolate itself and the NOAA layoffs continue, there will be cascading consequences for climate science, which is inherently a collaborative field. “When the United States doesn’t lead [on climate science], two things happen,” Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator of NOAA for research, recently told the press. “Other nations relax their own spending in these areas, and the world’s level of understanding starts to decline,” and “countries who we may not have as collegial an understanding with,” such as China, could ostensibly step in and “replace the United States and its leadership.”
That leaves NOAA increasingly alone, and Americans of all political stripes will suffer as a result. “The strategy to erase data and research, to pull the rug from under activism — it’s time-tested,” Lehner, the Cornell climate scientist, said. “But that’s where it’s very infuriating because NOAA’s data is bipartisanly useful.”
Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap senior reporter Jael Holzman.
Donald Trump’s second term has now entered its second month. His administration is doing much to slow down renewables, and everything it can to slow down offshore wind. Jael Holzman is a senior reporter at Heatmap and the author of our newsletter, “The Fight,” about local battles over renewable permitting around the country.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Jael about the bleak outlook for offshore wind, the use of presidential authority to impede energy development, and why solar has been spared — so far. 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: It seems like there’s a mix here of, you know, some projects are now facing active legal trouble because they still had major permits to secure and the Trump administration is now denying those permits. But some projects, as you were saying, seemed safe, but now they’re not. They’re worried about getting these kind of iterative findings from the government that you need to conduct any major work in federal waters.
How much of the chill that we’re seeing is about active permitting denials, versus how much of it is developers being like, we don’t want to risk getting a permit denied, or asking for something that would be very normal to get a normal approval in the course of normal business operations, getting it rejected and then just being stuck. And so we’d rather just pause, not ask for anything for four years, and then come back and start asking again?
Jael Holzman: Offshore wind industry executives won’t say this on the record, but they have anonymously told me, in many words, that they view what is happening to them in the federal permitting system as not only a barometer check for where the energy transition is, but even broader, it is a risk, it is a challenge, it is a threat to integrity.
With respect to our federal permitting processes, generally what we’re seeing here is, I’ve had some folks in conservative energy circles compare it to the Keystone XL-ification of the energy sector, where the political party that doesn’t like a particular technology weaponizes the permitting system against one particular sector. Now, obviously, it’s politically advantageous for conservatives to describe it this way, but I actually find it to be very useful because what it means is as the politics becomes more fraught for the party in power around a technology, there’s increasingly a willingness to step beyond the realm of what the permitting system is legally supposed to do. And that’s a danger if it’s weaponized against an entire sector.
You know, Keystone pipeline, that was one project. It was exemplary — there was a lot of fervor around that one project — that is not an entire sector having the thumb put on its scale by political officials to derail it, especially one that had been a decade-plus in the works and is required for the energy grids to remain stable in various parts of our country. You know, what we’re seeing here is federal officials not even being willing to schedule meetings for permitting processes that are legally required under the law.
For example, my reporting indicated that at least one project that was prioritized under a permitting reform law to have at least an idea public and put out there for when they would expect to get all their permits — this was the Blue Point Wind offshore wind proposal off the coast of New England and New Jersey, New York. And what we’re seeing here is essentially the obscuring of even what permitting reform ostensibly was supposed to do, right?
There was this conversation in D.C. before Trump took office that maybe if you couple statutory reforms that streamline the processes that currently exist, and you put some sort of timetable into the statute, and you combine that with some gimmes to the oil and gas people, right, at least you could grease the skids enough to have everyone benefit. But my reporting on what’s happened to offshore wind has truly revealed that in many respects, “all of the above” is really a Lucy-with-the-football moment for many proponents of an energy transition.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.