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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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A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination will hit clean energy and oil majors alike, including Exxon and Chevron.
A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination obtained by Heatmap reveals an additional 338 awards for clean energy projects that the agency intends to cancel. Combined with the 321 grants the agency said it was terminating last week, the total value is nearly $24 billion.
While last week’s announcement mostly targeted companies and institutions located in Democratic states, the new list appears to be indiscriminate. Conrad Schneider, the senior U.S. director at Clean Air Task Force, told me in a statement that the move “will have far-reaching consequences — with virtually no region unscathed.”
“The federal government plays an essential role in addressing gaps that stall the commercialization of energy breakthroughs by providing grants and loans to accelerate innovative projects,” he said. “By abruptly canceling funding for several hundred energy projects, the U.S. risks ceding American energy leadership and signals that U.S. innovation is not a priority.”
Some of the most significant new terminations on the list include:
While two of the seven hydrogen hubs — those in California and the Pacific Northwest — were on last week’s cancellations list, all seven have their status listed as “terminate” on this new list. That includes hubs that planned to make hydrogen from natural gas based in Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, Texas, and the Midwest.
Those awards came out of $8 billion allocated by Congress in the IIJA in 2021 to develop hubs where companies and states would work together to produce and test the use of cleaner hydrogen fuel in new industries. The move would hit oil majors in addition to green energy companies. Exxon and Chevron were partners on the Hyvelocity hydrogen hub on the Gulf Coast.
“If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told me. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses."
The Inflation Reduction Act’s Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grants, which were meant to support the conversion of shuttered or at-risk auto plants to be able to manufacture electric vehicles and their supply chains, would be fully obliterated based on the new list. All 13 grants that were awarded under the program are there, including $80 million for Blue Bird’s new electric school bus plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, $500 million for General Motors’ Grant River Assembly Plant in Lansing, Michigan, and $285 million for Mercedes-Benz’s next-generation electric van plant in Ladson, South Carolina.
Some of the other projects slated for termination raise questions about other projects from the same grant program that are not on the list. For example, a $45 million grant for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association to deploy microgrids in seven communities shows up as terminated, along with several other awards made as part of the IIJA’s Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas program. Grants for indigenous tribes in Alaska, Wisconsin, and throughout the Southwest from that program appear to be preserved, however.
A $9.8 million grant to Sparkz to build a first-of-its-kind battery-grade iron phosphate plant in West Virginia also makes an appearance. The award was made as part of a nearly $430 million funding round from the IIJA to accelerate domestic clean energy manufacturing in 15 former coal communities. Similar awards made to Anthro Energy in Louisville, Kentucky, Infinitum in Rockdale, Texas, Mainspring Energy in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, and a company called MetOx International developing an advanced superconductor manufacturing facility in the Southeast appear to be safe.
When asked about the new list, DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told me by email that he couldn’t attest to its validity. He added that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,” referring to the earlier 321 cancellations.
A new list of grant cancellations obtained by Heatmap includes Climeworks and Heirloom projects funded by 2021 infrastructure law.
Trump’s Department of Energy is planning to terminate awards for the two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap has learned.
An internal agency project list shared with Heatmap names nearly $24 billion worth of grants with their status designated as “terminated,” including the Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub as well as Project Cypress, a joint venture between DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks.
Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.”
“Demand for removals is increasing significantly, with momentum set to build as governments set their long-term targets,” he said. “The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and we’re working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.”
Heirloom’s head of global policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said that the company was not aware of any decision from the DOE and continued “to productively engage with the administration in a project review.” He added that Heirloom remains “incredibly proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with Louisiana energy majors, workforce groups, non-profits, state leaders, the governor and economic development organizations who have strongly advocated for this project.”
Much of the rest of the list overlaps with the project terminations the agency announced last week as part of a spate of retributive actions against Democrats during the government shutdown. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” White House Budget Director Russ Vought wrote on social media ahead of the announcement.
DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told me by email that the department was “unable to verify” the new list of canceled grants, and that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced.”
“As [Secretary of Energy Chris Wright] made clear last week, the Department continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration,” Dietderich said.
Direct air capture is a nascent technology that sucks carbon, as the name suggests, directly from the air, and is one of several carbon removal solutions with potential to slow global warming in the near term, and even reverse it in the long run. The $3.5 billion DAC Hubs program, created by Congress in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, promised to “establish a new sector of the American economy and remake another one, while providing the world with an important tool to fight climate change,” as my colleague Robinson Meyer put it.
After a competitive application process, the Biden administration selected two projects that would receive up to $600 million each to build DAC projects capable of removing more than 1 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year and storing it permanently underground. Occidental, which first partnered with and later acquired a Canadian DAC startup called Carbon Engineering, would build its hub in South Texas, near Corpus Christi. Two other leading DAC startups, the California-based Heirloom Carbon and Swiss company Climeworks, would work together to build a hub in Louisiana. After the selections were announced, both projects received an initial $50 million award for their next phase of development, which was set to be matched by private investment.
"These hubs were selected through a rigorous and competitive process designed to identify projects capable of advancing U.S. leadership in carbon removal and industrial decarbonization,” Jennifer Wilcox, the former principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, told me in an email. “The burden should be on DOE to clearly demonstrate why that process is being overturned.”
All three companies already have demonstration plants that are either operating or under construction. Climeworks began operating the world’s first commercial DAC plant in Iceland in 2021, designed to capture about 4,000 tons per year, and has since scaled up to a larger plant more than eight times that size. Heirloom opened the first DAC plant in the U.S. in November 2023, in Tracy, California, capable of capturing 1,000 tons per year. Occidental’s first DAC project, Stratos, in West Texas, will be the largest of the bunch, designed to capture 500,000 tons per year. It is set to be completed in the next few months.
Removing carbon from the air with one of these facilities is currently extremely expensive and energy-intensive. Today, companies pre-sell carbon credits to airlines and tech companies to raise money for the projects, but will likely require government support to continue to innovate and bring the cost down. While both Climeworks and Heirloom announced the sale of credits that would support their DAC hub projects, it’s not clear whether those credits were meant to be fulfilled by the projects themselves.
The DOE grants would have helped prove the viability of the technology at a scale that will make a measurable difference for the climate, while also demonstrating a potential off-ramp for oil companies and the economies they support. Both projects said they expected to create more than 2,000 local jobs in construction, operations, and maintenance.
“The United States, up to this point, was the direct air capture leader and the place where top innovators in the field were choosing to build facilities as well as manufacture the actual components of the units themselves,” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “The cancellation of these grants to high-quality projects ensures that these American jobs will be shipped overseas and cede our broader economic advantage.”
That’s already happening. On the same day last week that the DOE announced it was terminating an award for CarbonCapture Inc., another California-based DAC company, the startup said it would move its first commercial pilot from Arizona to Alberta, Canada. Gebald, of Climeworks, said the company has “a pipeline of other DAC projects around the world,” including opportunities in Canada, the U.K., and Saudi Arabia.
Cavanaugh also pointed out there was a disconnect between the terminations, Congress’ recent actions, and even actions under the first Trump administration. Trump’s DOE revised the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture in 2018 to allow direct air capture projects to qualify. In July, the reconciliation bill preserved that credit and strengthened it. “These were bipartisan-supported projects, and it goes expressly against congressional intent.”
As the DAC hubs program was congressionally mandated and the awards were under contract, the companies may have legal recourse to fight the terminations. The press release from the DOE announcing last week’s terminations said that award recipients had 30 days to appeal the decision. “That process must be meaningful and transparent,” Wilcox said. “If DOE is invoking financial-viability criteria, companies and communities deserve to see the underlying metrics, thresholds, and justification — and to understand whether those criteria are being applied consistently across projects.”
While this isn’t a death knell for DAC in general, it will be a “massive setback for American climate and industrial policy”, Erin Burns, executive director of the carbon removal advocacy group Carbon 180, told me. “The need for carbon removal hasn’t changed. The science hasn’t changed. What’s changed is our political will, and we’ll feel the consequences for years to come.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to add comment from the Department of Energy and to correct the total value of canceled grants.
On Trump’s metal nationalization spree, Tesla’s big pitch, and fusion’s challenges
Current conditions: King tides are raising ocean levels near Charleston, South Carolina, as much as eight feet above low water averages • A blizzard on Mount Everest has trapped hundreds of hikers and killed at least one • A depression that could form into Tropical Storm Jerry is strengthening in the Atlantic as it barrels northward with an unclear path.
Solar and wind outpaced the growth of global electricity demand in the first half of 2025, vaulting renewables toward overtaking coal worldwide for the first time on record, according to analysis published Tuesday by the research outfit Ember. This year’s growth resulted in a small overall decline in both coal and gas-fired power generation, with India and China seeing the most notable reductions, despite the United States and Europe ratcheting up fossil fuel usage. “We are seeing the first signs of a crucial turning point,” Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at Ember, said in a statement. “Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world’s growing appetite for electricity. This marks the beginning of a shift where clean power is keeping pace with demand growth.”
Wind and solar installations matched 109% of new global demand for power in the first half of 2025.Ember
That growth is projected to continue. Later on Tuesday morning, the International Energy Agency released its own report forecasting that renewable capacity will double over the next five years. Solar is predicted to make up 80% of that growth. But, factoring in the Trump administration’s policies, the forecast roughly cut in half previous projections for U.S. growth. Domestic opposition to renewables runs beyond the White House, too. Exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro and published in July showed that a fifth of U.S. counties now restrict development of renewables.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday directing federal agencies to push forward with a controversial 211-mile mining road in Alaska designed to facilitate production of copper, zinc, gallium, and other critical minerals. The project, which the Biden administration halted last year over concerns for permafrost in the fast-warming region, has been at the center of a decadeslong legal battle. As part of the deal, the U.S. government will invest $35.6 million in Alaska’s Ambler Mining District, including taking a 10% stake in the main developer, Trilogy Metals, that includes warrants to buy an additional 7.5% of the company. The road itself will be jointly owned by the state, the federal government, and Alaska Native villages. “It’s a very, very big deal from the standpoint of minerals and energy,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
It’s just the latest stake the Trump administration has taken in a mineral company. In July, the Department of Defense became the largest shareholder of MP Materials, the company producing rare earths in the U.S. at its Mountain Pass mine in California. The move, The Economist noted at the time, marked the biggest American experiment in direct government ownership since the nationalization of the railroads in World War I. Last week, the Department of Energy renegotiated a loan to Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass project in Nevada to take a stake in what’s set to become the largest lithium mine in the Western Hemisphere when it comes online in the next few years. The White House’s mineral shopping spree isn’t over. On Friday, Reuters reported that the administration is considering buying shares in Critical Metals, the company looking to develop rare earths production in Greenland. In response to the news, shares in the Nasdaq-traded miner surged 62% on Monday. Partial nationalization isn’t the only approach the administration is taking to challenging China’s grip over global mineral supplies. Last month, as I reported for Heatmap, the Defense Logistics Agency awarded money to Xerion, an Ohio startup devising a novel way to process cobalt and gallium.
Tesla looks poised to unveil a cheaper, stripped-down version of its Model Y as early as today. In one of two short videos posted to CEO Elon Musk’s X social media site, the electric automaker showed the midsize SUV’s signature lights beaming through the dark. The design matches what InsideEVs noted were likely images of the prototype spotted on a test drive in Texas. The second teaser video showed what appears to be a fast-spinning, Tesla-branded fan. “Your guess is as good as ours as to what will be revealed,” InsideEVs’ Andrei Nedelea wrote Monday. “Our money is on the Roadster or a new vacuum cleaner design to take on Dyson.”
The new products come amid an historic slump for Tesla. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, the company’s share of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to their lowest-ever level in August despite the surge in purchases as Americans rushed to use the federal tax credits before they expired thanks to Trump’s landmark One Big Beautiful Bill Act law. Yet Musk has managed to steer the automaker’s financial fate through an attention-grabbing maneuver. Last month, the world’s richest man bought $1 billion in Tesla shares in a show of self confidence that managed to rebound the company’s stock price. But Andrew Moseman argued in Heatmap that “the bullish stock market performance is divorced not only from the reality of the company’s electric car sales, but also from, well, everything else that’s happened lately.”
On Monday, Trump warned that medium and heavy-duty trucks imported to the U.S. will face a 25% tariff starting on November 1. The president announced the trade levies in a post on Truth Social on the eve of a White House visit by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose country would feel the pinch of tariffs on imported trucks. As the Financial Times noted, Trump had threatened to impose 25% tariffs on some trucks in late September but “failed to implement them, raising questions about his commitment to the policy.”
Fusion startups make a lot of bold claims about how soon a technology long dismissed as the energy source of tomorrow will be able to produce commercial electrons. Though investors are betting that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, “it is finally, possibly, almost time for fusion,” a new report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy shows that supply chain challenges threaten to hold back the nascent industry even if it can bring laboratory breakthroughs to market. Tritium, one of two main fusion fuels, has a half life of just 12.3 years, meaning it does not exist in significant quantities in nature. Today, tritium is primarily produced by 30 pressurized heavy water fission reactors globally, but only at a total of 4 kilograms per year. As a result, “tritium availability could throttle fusion development,” the report found. That’s not the only bottleneck. “The fusion industry will require specialized components that don’t yet have well-established supply chains, like superconducting cables and the aforementioned advanced materials, and shortages of these components would delay development and inflate costs.”
Scientists mapped the RNA — the molecules that carry out DNA’s instructions — of wheat and, for the first time, identified when certain genes are active. The discovery promises to accelerate plant breeders’ efforts to develop more resilient varieties of the world’s most widely cultivated crop that use less fertilizer, resist higher temperatures, and survive with less water as the climate changes. “We discovered how groups of genes work together as regulatory networks to control gene expression,” Rachel Rusholme-Pilcher, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Britain’s Earlham Institute, said in a statement. “Our research allowed us to look at how these network connections differ between wheat varieties, revealing new sources of genetic diversity that could be critical in boosting the resilience of wheat.”