You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
If he loses — which, at this stage, seems likely — this will all have been for nought.
Let’s start here: Joe Biden is losing the presidential election. He is now roughly 2 points behind Donald Trump in national polls, according to the FiveThirtyEight average. Though that may sound small, no Democrat has been further behind in the polls, at this point in the election, since Al Gore in 2000.
Some of this collapse is due to fatigue with Democrats in general, part of a global wave of anti-incumbent fervor. But at least some is specific to Biden. In some swing state polls, a large gap has opened up between Biden and the Democratic Senate candidate. Senator Tammy Baldwin, for instance, is running 12 points ahead of Biden in Wisconsin, according to an AARP poll released on Tuesday. Wisconsin is one of three key states that the president must win to clinch re-election.
This is, obviously, a significant problem for Democrats. Senator Michael Bennett, a Democrat of Colorado, believes the party is on track to lose control of the House and Senate in addition to the presidency.
But it is a particular issue for those who believe the American economy should decarbonize. Biden alone among candidates in the presidential election has an impressive climate record: He fought for the passage of — and subsequently signed — the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate law in American history. For 30 years, Democrats had tried and failed to pass comprehensive climate legislation through the U.S. Senate; it finally happened under Biden’s watch.
The Biden administration has also used its considerable presidential powers to lower carbon emissions: The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rules that would significantly cut heat-trapping pollution from power plants, cars and trucks, and the oil and gas sector, and the Department of Energy and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have each set out their own emissions-reducing rules.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is also helping to establish new, multi-billion-dollar “hubs” that aim to commercialize clean hydrogen production and carbon removal technologies. The president even stepped in to block new natural gas export terminals — a move that I have more complicated feelings about, but that, in any case, a federal judge has now blocked.
I don’t need to go over the litany of Trump’s environmental misdeeds, but suffice it to say that during his time in office, Donald Trump demonstrated a distinct glee in tearing up climate regulations and blocking decarbonization. He withdrew America from the Paris Agreement, rolled back the EPA’s climate rules, and deemed climate change a “hoax.” In his second term, he again seeks to overturn the EPA’s new climate proposals, including requirements that automakers sell more electric vehicles. The Heritage Foundation’s more complete plans for a second Trump administration — dubbed Project 2025 — calls for closing dozens of government offices concerned with climate change, ending energy efficiency standards, repealing the IRA’s tax credits, and breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Suffice it to say: Biden is the only serious candidate in the race who wants to do something about climate change. He is the climate candidate, and he has a climate record to run on. But Biden has miserably failed to communicate any of these policy successes to the masses. Nearly 60% of voters said they knew little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the Heatmap Climate Poll, conducted late last year. (A Yale and George Mason University survey found roughly similar results.)
You might think that reveals a canny strategy on the White House’s part: Perhaps it knows the IRA is divisive, and so it is only bragging about the law to the right audience. But polling shows Biden’s policies are consistently failing to reach the very Americans who should have heard about them — the subset of Americans who are worried about climate change and want to see something done about it. Of Americans who believe climate change is a “very important” issue, only 10% have heard or read a lot about Biden’s climate policies, according to an April CBS News/YouGov poll. And nearly half of Americans who rate climate change highly said that they have heard nothing or “very little” about Biden’s efforts, according to the same survey.
That is not the only poll to reach that conclusion. Another recent survey, conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Research, found that nearly half of Americans were more concerned about climate change this year than they were last year — but that barely any of that cohort had heard about the IRA, and few thought the legislation would affect their lives or mitigate climate change. Nearly half of the poll’s respondents either didn’t know whether the IRA would help climate change or thought it would make it worse. The IRA — and Biden’s climate agenda more broadly — is failing to break through.
Now, I don’t labor under the impression that climate change is a particularly potent or popular electoral issue. I’ve come to think that climate, if not actively deleterious to Democrats, is at least an electoral sideshow to the more enduring issues at the center of American politics: the economy, interest rates, taxes, health care, and national security. (Of course, climate change could vastly reshape the American economy and the public’s health, but other, more immediate concerns — such as employment, inflation, or abortion access — understandably remain more front-of-mind for voters.)
But as a climate journalist, I’ve still found the past two years perplexing. Why do so few people seem to understand the IRA’s goals? Why has the Biden administration struggled so much to communicate the IRA’s most popular aspect — namely, that it will reduce electricity costs (if not inflation itself) for voters? Consider the bare political record here: The Biden administration passed a law called the Inflation Reduction Act, and inflation subsequently came down. A more competent administration would be all over that simplistic, but still potent, victory. So why don’t more people seem to know about what Biden is doing? How is the federal government doing so much on climate change and nobody — not even climate-concerned Democrats — seem to care?
These questions have an easy answer: The candidate is not capable of communicating these victories, so they are not breaking through. Biden, in his diminished state, is not a skilled, crisp, or even very decipherable communicator. As Ezra Klein has observed, Biden is not generating the kind of memorable moments or sterling speeches that Democrats can share among themselves. He is barely speaking in complete sentences. In today’s fragmented media landscape, where first-person accounts and viral videos can go much further than news stories or wonky analysis, the candidate must be the chief champion of his or her victories. Judging from Biden’s disastrous performance at the first presidential debate — and his relative lack of lengthy, unscripted public appearances since then, and the account of those who have interacted with him — he seemingly cannot meet that standard.
Biden’s tremendous climate legacy rests on whether he can sell his accomplishments to the public and win the 2024 election. And that ability is faltering, to say the least.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.