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A victory for activists also represents a political gamble for the president.

Perhaps the biggest political test of the climate movement has now arrived.
There are a few ways to think about this. But first, the facts: The Biden administration will temporarily stop approving new liquified natural gas export terminals, allowing the Energy Department to study the effect that they have on the climate, the White House announced on Friday.
The decision is a victory for climate activists, who had demanded President Joe Biden halt the growth of what may be the country’s most important fossil fuel industry. It also throws into question whether some of the biggest pending LNG projects — such as Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, a proposed Louisiana terminal that activists have dubbed a “carbon mega bomb” — will ultimately get built.
The pause could also complicate Biden’s foreign policy, which has used America’s status as a major energy supplier to pacify allies and wield economic might. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and throttled gas supplies to Europe, the United States has used its vast stores of liquified natural gas to supply allied countries with energy that conventional estimates say is less climate-polluting than coal.
In a statement, Biden framed the pause as a crucial part of his administration’s ambitious climate policy.
“From Day One, my administration has set the United States on an unprecedented course to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad,” Biden said. “This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.
While the approvals are paused, the Energy Department will study the effect liquified natural gas export terminals could have on domestic and global greenhouse gas emissions. That review will likely last more than a year, almost certainly pushing a final decision until after the presidential election.
Biden also said the pause could be suspended in the case “of unanticipated and immediate national security emergencies.”
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined a call with reporters on Thursday. “As our exports increase,” she said, “we must review export applications using the most comprehensive up-to-date analysis of the economic, environmental and national security considerations.”
Although the United States only began exporting liquified natural gas in 2016, it is now the world’s top exporter of the fossil fuel. And the country’s dominance in the industry is growing. By 2027, a slate of new liquified natural gas facilities
are set to open in North America, including several in the U.S., doubling the continent’s export capacity.
I think it’s fair to say that the Biden administration took many climate experts — a different class than activists, to be clear — by surprise. Liam Denning, a Bloomberg columnist who is no enemy of the green transition, dubbed the pause “clever, clever politics and bad policy.”
The activist case against liquified natural gas turns on an incendiary new analysis by Robert Howarth, a Cornell professor of ecology and environmental biology, that claims exporting natural gas could be significantly worse than coal for the climate. Howarth’s analysis has not been published in a scientific journal, but it has been cited repeatedly by the climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben, who has emerged as perhaps the leading opponent of building the new terminals. Using Howarth’s math, CP2 and other export terminals start to look worse than the Willow pipeline in Alaska that the Biden administration approved last year.
It’s hard to imagine Biden making this decision if the campaign wasn’t freaking out about getting Gen Z and younger Millennials to vote. The president’s polling among young voters has been so abysmal lately that it defied belief at first, and young voters widely oppose how America is handling Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip. This is more than a messaging problem: Young voters have a substantive policy disagreement with the Biden administration about the most salient international issue of the last six months.
The administration seems to be hoping a pause on LNG approvals will help reverse that dismal momentum. Yet doing so will bring its own electoral risks. In November, Heatmap polled roughly 1,000 Americans about key climate issues. While we didn’t ask what Biden should do about natural gas pipelines specifically, we did ask a more wide-ranging question about the recent March to End Fossil Fuels, which drew tens of thousands of demonstrators to New York in September. Protesters demanded, among other things, that Biden suspend or revoke approvals for all new fossil-fuel infrastructure.
Here was our mouthful of a poll question:
In September, more than 50,000 people marched in New York City demanding that the Biden administration and Congress “end fossil fuels.” These activists want the Biden administration to stop all oil exports, block new oil and gas pipelines from being built, and ban any company from drilling on government-owned land. These policies would increase gasoline prices, but some scientists say they are essential to slowing down the dangerous increase in global temperatures. Do you support or oppose the Biden administration and Congress adopting policies aimed at permanently ending the oil, gas, and coal industries?
Respondents were split — and, frankly, confused. Forty-two percent of Americans opposed ending the fossil-fuel industry; 41% supported it. Nearly 20% of Americans said they were unsure what Biden and Congress should do. And while sunsetting the fossil fuel industry won majority support among Democrats and liberal independents, a plurality of moderate independents said they would oppose such a policy. Two-thirds of Republicans rejected it, too.
I will confess that I am not sure that the American public, in practice, is as split on taking aggressive steps to end the fossil-fuel industry as the poll finds. That’s because elsewhere in our poll, we found that 62% of Americans said they supported the federal government “making it easier to drill for fossil fuels and build new fossil fuel pipelines.” Some sizable percentage of voters seemingly want Biden both to support fossil fuels and kill fossil fuels — a logical impossibility.
But the results of the fossil fuel march question become more interesting — and more politically relevant, I think — when you break them out by age group. The young and the old, we found, were divided on the fossil fuel industry. Slightly more than half of adults aged 18 to 34 said Biden and Congress should work to shut it down. But most older adults, defined here as anyone 65 and older, opposed such a move.
When you look deeper beneath the hood, those results get even more complicated. Of the young adults who support ending the fossil-fuel industry, most said they were “somewhat” in support of the idea. But of the older adults who opposed it, a majority were “strongly” against the idea. In other words, the largest share of young people were weakly for ending the fossil-fuel industry, while the largest share of older people were strongly against it.
That poses a dilemma for Biden. While younger and middle-aged adults drive social media discourse and shape media coverage, it is the old who consistently show up to vote. In that way, the fossil-fuel industry is — like the Gaza war — a young/old scissor issue; it divides the electorate along age lines in a way guaranteed to alienate some part of the president’s coalition. (Of course, most older Americans won’t see much of the consequences of greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels in their lifetime — but that fact, while ethically relevant, does not have immediate electoral bearing.)
The one grace for the president is that the fossil-fuel issue doesn’t divide Democrats as much, per se; about two-thirds of older Democrats said that they would back a plan to shut down the oil and gas industry. Yet self-identified independents, whom the president must win in November, were more evenly split. There is no easy out.
McKibben has declared provisional victory over the issue. “Joe Biden has just done more than any president before him to check the expansion of dirty energy,” he wrote on X when the first unconfirmed reports broke. “This is the biggest check any president has ever applied to the fossil fuel industry, and the strongest move against dirty energy in American history,” he later elaborated. I will be curious if that message breaks through — it is an endorsement that I think many young voters would be surprised to hear.
Under Biden, Congress has passed the most aggressive climate legislation in U.S. history — not only in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its tax incentives for clean energy, but also the bipartisan infrastructure law, which directed hundreds of billions to public transit and next-generation energy research. Yet instead of celebrating that victory, many climate-concerned young voters — or at least the environmentalist groups that purport to speak for them — spent much of 2023 fixated on the president’s approval of the Willow pipeline. While I’ve never seen a scientific sample, it’s pretty clear that the negative news about Willow broke through among young voters to a far greater extent than the positive news about the IRA, even though the IRA will reduce greenhouse gas emissions far more than the Willow pipeline will increase them.
With the LNG pause, the Biden administration has avoided another Willow “betrayal”-style story among the youngs. But it may also have invited negative coverage from other factions of the press — including business and energy analysts who doubt Howarth’s analyses and remain more equivocal about LNG. This is why this moment is such a test for climate activists: If they cannot generate a positive news cycle for the president at this moment — or rather, if they can’t convince young people that Biden has done something good on climate change — then their utility in the coalition will come into question.
Below all of this lurks a possibility that would be truly toxic for climate politics: that the social media-driven environment in which younger adults marinate can only direct attention to negative stories. What if X, Instagram, and TikTok generate outrage and nihilism far more easily than support and solidarity? That would be dangerous not only for climate politics, but also for the entire progressive agenda, which requires the public — perhaps above all — to believe in the possibility of mutual uplift and civic competency.
Biden is presiding over a country in profound transition, trying to manage and redirect subterranean rivers of history that — much to his campaign’s chagrin — remain well outside his control. The United States is stuck between two regimes, two economies: the fossil-fueled, Middle East-managing policy of old, and the clean, climate-friendlier, Asia-focused policy of the future. Voters are split, too. As much as Biden officials and young people might want to push the economy toward the latter, America keeps getting dragged back toward the former — by its economy, by its electorate, and by events themselves.
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“I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate.”
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s most important funders of climate-related causes, has a new message: Lighten up on the “doomsday.”
In a new memo, called “Three tough truths about climate,” Gates calls for a “strategic pivot.” Climate-concerned philanthropy should focus on global health and poverty, he says, which will still cause more human suffering than global warming.
“I’m not saying we should ignore temperature-related deaths because diseases are a bigger problem,” he writes. “What I am saying is that we should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause, and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health so that extreme weather isn’t such a threat to them.”
This new focus didn’t come with a change in funding priorities — but that’s partly because some big shake-ups have already happened. In February, Heatmap reported that Breakthrough Energy, Gates’ climate-focused funding group, had slashed its grant-making budget. Gates later closed Breakthrough’s policy and advocacy office altogether.
Despite eliminating those financial commitments, he still dwells on two of his longtime obsessions in the new memo: cutting the “green premium” for energy technologies, meaning the delta between the cost of carbon-emitting and clean energy technologies, and improving the measurement of how spending can do the most for human welfare. The same topics dominated his thinking when I last spoke to the billionaire at the 2023 United Nations climate conference in Dubai.
What seems to have shifted, instead, is the global political environment. The Trump administration and Elon Musk gutted the federal government’s spending on global public health causes, such as vaccines and malaria prevention. European countries have also cut back their global aid spending, although not as dramatically as the U.S.
Gates seemingly now feels called to their defense: “Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent,” he writes, praising the vaccine alliance Gavi in particular. “Energy innovation is a good buy not because it saves lives now, but because it will provide cheap clean energy and eventually lower emissions, which will have large benefits for human welfare in the future.”
Last week, Gates shared his thinking about climate change at a roundtable with a handful of reporters. He was, as always, engaging. I’ve shared some of his new takes on climate policy below. His quotes have been edited for clarity.
The environment we’re in today, the policies for climate change are less accommodating. It’s hard to name a country where you’d say, Oh, the climate policies are more accommodating today than they have been in the past.
The thesis I had was that middle income countries — who were already, at that time, the majority of all emissions — would never pay a premium for greenness. And so you could say, well, maybe the rich countries should subsidize that. But you know, the amounts involved would get you up to, like, 4% of rich country budgets would have to be transferred to do that. And we’re at 1% and going down. And there are some other worthy things that that money goes for, other than subsidizing positive green premium type approaches. So the thesis in the book [How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021] is we had to innovate our way to negative green premiums for the middle income countries.
Climate [change] is an evil thing in that it’s caused by rich countries and high middle-income countries and the primary burden [falls on poor countries]. When I looked into climate activists, I said, Well, this is incredible. They care about poor countries so much. That’s wonderful, that they feel guilty about it. But in fact, a lot of climate activists, they have such an extreme view of what’s going to happen in rich countries — their climate activism is not because they care about poor farmers and Africa, it’s because they have some purported view that, like, New York City, can’t deal with the flooding or the heat.
The other challenge we have in the climate movement is in order to have some degree of accountability, it was very focused on short-term goals and per-country reports. And the per-country reporting thing is, in a way, a good thing, because a country — certainly when it comes to deforestation or what it’s doing on its electric grid, there is sovereign accountability for what’s being done. But I mean, the way everybody makes steel is the same. The way everybody makes the cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same. And so there can’t be some wonderful surprise, where some country comes in and, you know, gives you this little number [for its Paris Agreement goals], and you go, Wow, good! You’re so tough, you’re so good, you’re so amazing. Because other than deforestation and your particular electric grid, these are all global things.
If you’re a rich country, the costs of adaptation are just one of many, many things that are not gigantic, huge percentages of GDP — you know, rebuilding L.A. so that it’s like the Getty Museum, in terms of there’s no brush that can catch on fire, there’s no roof that can catch on fire, adds about 10% cost to the rebuild. It’s not like, Oh my god, we can’t live in LA. There’s no apocalyptic story for rich countries. [Climate adaptation] is one of many things that you should pay attention to, like, Does your health system work? Does your education system work? Does your political system work? There are a variety of things that are also quite important.
The place where it gets really tough is in these poor countries. But you know, what is the greatest tool for climate adaptation? Getting rich — growing your economy is the biggest single thing, living in conditions where you don’t face big climate problems. So when you say to an African country, Hey, you have a natural gas deposit, and we’re going to try to block you from getting financing for using that natural gas deposit … It probably won’t work, because there’s a lot of money in the world. It’s not clear how you’d achieve that. And it’s also in terms of the warming effect of that natural gas, versus the improvement of the conditions of the people in that country — it’s not even a close thing.
People in the [climate] movement, we do have to say to ourselves, For the Europeans, how much were they willing to pay in order to support climate? — and did we overestimate in terms of forcing them to switch to electric cars, to buy electric heat pumps, to have their price of electricity be higher? Did we overestimate their willingness to pay with some of those policies? And you do have to be careful because if your climate policies are too aggressive, you will be unelected, and you’ll have a right-wing government that cares not a bit about climate. I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate. You worry they care so much about it that the people you talk to, you won’t be able to meet with them again, because they won’t be in power.
On EV investments hitting the brakes, Google’s nuclear restart, and a new data center consensus
Current conditions: Cyclone Montha is poised to make landfall over the Andhra Pradesh coast in eastern India with winds of up to 62 miles per hour • South Africa’s Northern Cape faces extremely high fire risks • Southwest California is also facing high risk of wildfires amid Santa Ana winds and dry, warm conditions today and tomorrow.

Hurricane Melissa has strengthened into a major storm, threatening to make landfall over Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba as a Category 5 hurricane in the next few hours, with winds up to 180 miles per hour and more than four feet of rainfall. It’s likely to be the strongest storm to hit Jamaica since records started in 1851, with storm surge lapping the coast with waves of up to 15 feet. Already the storm has killed at least six people in the northern Caribbean. Evacuations started on Monday. “This can quickly escalate into a humanitarian crisis where a large number of people are in need of basic supplies such as food, safe drinking water, housing and medical care,” AccuWeather forecasters warned on Monday. “The prolonged nature of impacts can result in entire communities being cut off from aid and support for multiple days.”
The U.S. is just weeks away from reviving a shuttered nuclear plant for the first time, as Holtec International’s Palisades plant in Michigan nears its restart. Once that’s done, the Microsoft-backed project to revive the still-operable reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility is likely the next nuclear site to come back from permanent decommissioning. Add another to the list. On Monday, Google inked a deal to back the restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, Iowa’s only atomic power station. As I reported in this newsletter back in August, NextEra was already considering a restart of the station, which shut down in 2020. It is, as my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in August, the zenith of the "nuclear dealmaking boom.”
The move comes as the U.S. finally embraces large-scale reactors again after years of pegging all future hopes of new nuclear construction on as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors. On Tuesday, the U.S. government announced an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to build a fleet of at least eight new power plants with a mix of gigawatt-sized AP1000s and some smaller versions, the Financial Times reported.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has breaking news on New York’s energy future: Swiftsure, a 650-megawatt battery energy storage development planned for New York’s Staten Island, was quietly scuttled in August. Rather than make a public announcement, the developer, Fullmark Energy (formerly Hecate), instead wrote a letter to the New York State Department of Public Service withdrawing the proposal. As Jael wrote, “nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.” The project faced heavy opposition, including from New York Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. The campaigns of Democrat Zohran Mamdani and independent Andrew Cuomo did not respond to requests for comment.
In other local news, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange is out with a remarkable new series called The Aftermath, a look at surviving the infernos that are increasingly a fact of life in parts of the U.S., especially out West. The series includes stories on the challenges involved in evacuation, why relocation can be impossible, the stories of wildfires that don’t capture national attention, the limits of what the public knows and doesn’t know about wildfires, and the buffers towns such as the fire-scorched Paradise, California, are trying to establish.
Investments in electric vehicle-related infrastructure, including batteries factories, vehicle assembly plants, and charging stations, tumbled by nearly a third to $8.1 billion in the three months leading to September compared to the same period a year earlier, according to the Financial Times. The analysis, based on data from the U.S. Clean Investment Monitor, found that about $7 billion of planned EV investments were abandoned between April and September. The pullback could define the West’s place in the EV industry for years to come, widening China’s lead over production of battery-powered cars. “We need to … be quicker in development to compete with the Chinese,” Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars, told the newspaper. “As soon as you weaken these signals, everything will slow down,” he added, referring to the knock-on effect of policy changes emanating from the White House.
When Secretary of Energy Chris Wright last week directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track interconnection request for large new energy users, he also endorsed the somewhat controversial idea that big electricity users such as data centers should dial back their operations from time to time when the grid is stressed, Latitude Media’s Lisa Martine Jenkins reported last week. On Monday, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI threw its weight behind the idea. In a letter to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Christopher Lehane, OpenAI’s chief government affairs officer, called on regulators to “expand use of curtailable load resources and modernize interconnection policy.” Lehane said “we welcomed the news last week that” Wright had expressed support for the policy. “To strengthen grid reliability and expand capacity for AI and other flexible loads, FERC should allow more demand-side participation in wholesale markets and speed up interconnection for large loads that can curtail,” he added.
The idea has been gaining momentum since Duke Energy researcher Tyler Norris put out a landmark paper in February identifying up to 100 gigawatts of additional load the grid could absorb if data centers simply adopted a policy of reducing power consumption when there was a shortage of electrons. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called it “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
Carbon removal startup Rewind has launched DMS Georgia, the first commercial-scale carbon removal operation using deep mine storage. It’s the first time a certified carbon credit will be delivered by plant-based carbon in naturally oxygen-free underground environments. The project aims to bury carbon-emitting biomass in environments where the lack of oxygen makes decomposition impossible. By 2030, Rewind aims to remove one million metric tons of carbon per year.
Fullmark Energy quietly shuttered Swiftsure, a planned 650-megawatt energy storage system on Staten Island.
The biggest battery project in New York has been canceled in a major victory for the nascent nationwide grassroots movement against energy storage development.
It’s still a mystery why exactly the developer of Staten Island’s Swiftsure project, Fullmark Energy (formerly known as Hecate), pulled the plug. We do know a few key details: First, Fullmark did not announce publicly that it was killing the project, instead quietly submitting a short, one-page withdrawal letter to the New York State Department of Public Service. That letter, which is publicly available, is dated August 18 of this year, meaning that the move formally occurred two months ago. Still, nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.
Second, Swiftsure was going to be massive. It was the largest planned battery storage project in New York State, according to public records, with the ability to store upwards of 650 megawatts of electricity — enough to power more than half a million homes. That makes Swiftsure likely one of the largest battery projects in the country, with more capacity than any other energy storage project currently facing opposition in the U.S., according to our very own Heatmap Pro database. This is the second Fullmark project to totally flop in recent months. We reported last week that one of the company’s projects outside of Los Angeles had its permits voided in a court ruling that also blocked battery storage development in unincorporated areas outside the city.
Third, and potentially most significant for energy developers in New York City: Swiftsure’s death will almost certainly embolden the anti-storage activist movement.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee in next week’s New York mayoral election, was one of many local politicians who opposed Swiftsure and rallied with residents close to the proposed site in May. He’s part of a broader trend of Republican politicians becoming skeptical of battery storage sites near where people live and work, including in Democrat-ruled New York.
Putting batteries in the five boroughs has always been a challenge, but January’s Moss Landing battery fire in California created a PR frenzy in the city, as conservative figures seized on the online panic created by the blaze. Once-agnostic GOP members of Congress from New York City are now anti-battery storage in their backyards, including Anthony D’Esposito, Nicole Malliotakis and Mike Lawler. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin — a former NYC congressman — is now weighing in against individual battery projects on Long Island and Staten Island.
Swiftsure was proposed in 2023 and permitted by the state last year. Fullmark was given a deadline of this spring to submit routine paperwork demonstrating how it would comply with conditions of the site’s permit, including how the battery storage project would be decommissioned. In August, the New York Department of Public Service gave Fullmark an extension until October 11.
Instead of meeting that October deadline, it seems Fullmark quietly withdrew its Swiftsure proposal.
It’s unclear how Democrat Zohran Mamdani or independent Andrew Cuomo would handle the rise of the anti-battery movement if either of them wins the November 4 mayoral election. That’s partially because energy policy and climate change have been non-issues in the campaign, saving small mentions of nuclear power, heat pumps, or gas prices in one-off debate answers or social media posts.
Sliwa, who has referred to Swiftsure as a “mini Chernobyl,” told me that he anticipates this victory will lead to more protests at more battery sites, no matter who wins the mayoral election. “The cancellation of this lithium-ion battery warehouse will reverberate throughout the boroughs,” Sliwa told me Monday. “It’ll be a rallying cry [because] it’s not a fait accompli that these facilities will be complete and operational.”
The Mamdani and Cuomo campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Swiftsure’s cancellation.