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Whether that will matter in November is another story.
As President Joe Biden prepares to run for re-election, one fact has eluded much notice: His climate change policies are pretty popular.
In an exclusive Heatmap poll of 1,000 Americans conducted by Benenson Strategy Group late last year, most respondents backed the core ideas behind Biden’s climate policies. They expressed the most support of ideas meant to beef up the country’s manufacturing economy and build more renewable electricity.
Nearly 90% of Americans, for instance, support encouraging domestic manufacturing. They also support using tax incentives to make homes more energy efficient (85%), funding research into carbon dioxide removal (81%), investing in public transit (80%), and implementing policies that address environmental injustices (78%).
That is despite the overwhelming public disappointment in Biden. Biden’s approval rating has fallen to 37%, an all-time low of his presidency, despite his boisterous State of the Union performance. At first glance, Biden’s climate policy might seem to pose a paradox: It’s really popular (at least facially), but nobody has seemed to notice. That may persist through the November election. But it will not be able to last for too long after that.
The least popular policies are those that Biden has pursued only when he has bipartisan support — or that he has not pursued at all. Making it easier to build new fossil fuel pipelines, for instance, is supported by 62% of Americans, less than almost any other policy aimed at increasing the country’s energy supply. A slight majority of Americans support making it easier to build new nuclear power plants.
At first I doubted the veracity of these results — some of Biden’s policies are, after all, putting up autocrat-like ratings. A carbon tax is polling 52 points above water.
But these results largely match other polling. Surveys reliably find that about two-thirds of Americans would support some kind of carbon tax. Last year, for instance, 68%of Americans backed “requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax,” according to a Yale poll. These numbers have been remarkably stable over time. As much as 67% of Americans backed a carbon tax in 2019, according to a poll from the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC Center on Public Affairs Research.
If these numbers surprise you, you’re not alone. Most Americans underestimate public support for pro-climate policies. (Or at least, they underestimate what polling finds about Americans’ support for climate policies.)
The rub is that public support descends to more Earthly levels once you start asking about concrete costs. Those who say they support a carbon tax when told it will be imposed on fossil fuel companies, for instance, may change their minds after fossil fuel companies pass that tax along as higher prices. Another University of Chicago poll found that most Americans were okay paying a monthly fee of $1 to fight climate change. When asked if they’d pay $40 a month, support fell to 23%.
One of the more ironic aspects of Biden’s success is how rapidly commentators have forgotten that climate change policy used to be seen as uniquely difficult to legislate in the United States. In 1993, and then again in 2010, the House of Representatives passed bills that would have helped fight climate change. Each time, the Senate blocked the legislation. The Senate also effectively blocked the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the first international climate treaty, in the 1990s.
Through the decades, Congress passed energy bills meant to expand the energy supply in an all-of-the-above way and changed the tax code to let people and companies save money by building solar or wind energy. But these policies expired every few years, and they failed to amount to a unified climate strategy.
Other countries with other forms of government — China, the United Kingdom, the European Union member states — didn’t have this problem. (Which doesn’t mean that they’ve been perfect on climate change.) America’s failure to pass climate policy became a singular indictment of its bicameral system.
Why was it so hard to pass climate policy? The short answer is that for years, climate advocates focused on one particular policy — carbon pricing — as a cure-all solution to climate change. And while carbon pricing is backed up by economic theory, environmentalists and economists struggled to generate the kind of durable, veto-proof support that legislation needs to pass in today’s environment.
By design, carbon pricing raises the cost of energy — meaning that opponents can paint it as a measure meant to increase the cost of living. That didn’t work for voters in the persistently sluggish economy of the 2010s, and it split Democrats’ coalition — of college-educated liberals and lower-income workers — in half. (It also struggled to deal with the political mise en scene. Washington’s interest in climate policy has usually peaked during moments of high energy prices, but the past decade’s fracking boom kept a lid on oil and natural gas prices.)
But climate advocates also struggled for years against more political-economic obstacles. As the political scientist Matto Mildenberger documented, climate proposals have historically invited pro-business groups and labor unions to team up and fight a common enemy. Because climate policy targeted entire industries at once — and because these industries were, naturally, especially sensitive to wholesale energy prices — environmentalists had to take on labor and management at the same time.
It didn’t help that many of the industries concerned had a special claim to Democrats’ sensibilities. Until recently, many of the sectors most affected by climate policy were unionized at a higher rate than the average. Even today, more than 20% of utility workers belong to a union, for example, as compared to 6% of workers in the private sector. These rates were even higher in the recent past. About 16% of automaking workers are represented by unions today, but union membership stood at 60% within living memory. Even in 2010, about one in 10 American workers in the mining, quarrying, and fossil-fuel extraction industries were represented by a union, which was also above the national rate at the time.
Democrats dealt with these problems by abandoning most broad-scale attempts to tax fossil fuels. During the Trump administration, progressives chose to focus instead on using industrial policy and regulations to rein in carbon-intensive sectors — instead of raising the cost of fossil fuels, perhaps a climate law could lower the cost of clean alternatives. And instead of raising energy prices — thereby annoying voters and discouraging high-profile industries — perhaps policy could lower them. Hence the Inflation Reduction Act.
This approach succeeded! And yet many of the IRA’s policies have struggled to attract public attention. Even though the IRA is Biden’s signature legislative achievement — comparable to President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — Biden has largely avoided the specific backlash that greeted that law. Obamacare was about 10 points underwater in 2010, even as Obama himself was about as popular as he was unpopular. Biden, by contrast, is incredibly disliked — he is now 17 points underwater, a nadir for his presidency — yet the IRA’s core ideas remain well-liked.
That is politically inconvenient for Biden and it raises difficult long-term questions for progressives. Biden and Democrats have seemingly given voters what they want — and it’s not clear that the voters care.
But for the would-be Grover Cleveland to Biden's Benjamin Harrison, it might be more of a problem. If elected, Trump has promised to repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. His rhetoric on climate change hasn’t really changed since the 2016 election, when he argued that it was “job-killing.” Meanwhile, he hates electric vehicles, claiming that “they don’t go far, they cost too much, and they’re all going to be made in China.”
Yet it’s the electric vehicles made in America that are going to get him. If Trump repeals the IRA’s subsidies, then domestic manufacturing will suffer. The EV industry has created roughly 70,000 jobs over the past three years, and many of those roles are in electorally decisive states, including Georgia and Michigan. Trump has promised to act as a “Day One dictator,” but even then, he will still be at least partly constrained by the desires and interests of the local and state-level Republicans who support him — and they will need those jobs and investment to continue.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that these policies will produce political support. In Texas, an explosion of renewable construction has led not to surging public support for clean energy, but to a state-led “war” on wind and solar. (That said, renewables don’t generate local jobs and economic activity in the same long-term way that factories do.) Yet these policies don’t ever have to be popular to be durable — in part because voters won’t organize around them until they’re threatened. Biden’s climate policies — no matter how popular — will probably never win him reelection. But they could very well protect his legacy long after he’s gone.
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On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Current conditions: Storms continue to roll through North Texas today, where a home caught fire from a lightning strike earlier this week • Warm, dry days ahead may hinder hotshot crews’ attempts to contain the 1,500-acre Sawlog fire, burning about 40 miles west of Butte, Montana• Severe thunderstorms could move through Rome today on the first day of the papal conclave.
The International Energy Agency published its annual Global Methane Tracker report on Wednesday morning, finding that over 120 million tons of the potent greenhouse gas were emitted by oil, gas, and coal in 2024, close to the record high in 2019. In particular, the research found that coal mines were the second-largest energy sector methane emitter after oil, at 40 million tons — about equivalent to India’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Abandoned coal mines alone emitted nearly 5 million tons of methane, more than abandoned oil and gas wells at 3 million tons.
“Coal, one of the biggest methane culprits, is still being ignored,” Sabina Assan, the methane analyst at the energy think tank Ember, said in a statement. “There are cost-effective technologies available today, so this is a low-hanging fruit of tackling methane.” Per the IEA report, about 70% of all annual methane emissions from the energy sector “could be avoided with existing technologies,” and “a significant share of abatement measures could pay for themselves within a year.” Around 35 million tons of total methane emissions from fossil fuels “could be avoided at no net cost, based on average energy prices in 2024,” the report goes on. Read the full findings here.
Opportunities to reduce methane emissions in the energy sector, 2024
IEA
The Environmental Protection Agency told staff this week that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization, The Washington Post reports. The Energy Star program, which was created under President George H.W. Bush, has, in the past three decades, helped Americans save more than $500 billion in energy costs by directing them to more efficient appliances, as well as prevented an estimated 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere since 1992, according to the government’s numbers. Almost 90% of Americans recognize its blue logo on sight, per The New York Times.
President Trump, however, has taken a personal interest in what he believes are poorly performing shower heads, dishwashers, and other appliances (although, as we’ve fact-checked here at Heatmap, many of his opinions on the issue are outdated or misplaced). In a letter on Tuesday, a large coalition of industry groups including the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in defense of Energy Star, arguing it is “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the electric vehicle tax credit may be on its last legs, according to an interview he gave Bloomberg on Tuesday. “I think there is a better chance we kill it than save it,” Johnson said. “But we’ll see how it comes out.” He estimated that House Republicans would reveal their plan for the tax credits later this week. Still, as Bloomberg notes, a potential hangup may be that “many EV factories have been built or are under construction in GOP districts.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, President Trump flirted with ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs throughout his campaign, a move that would mark “a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles,” my colleague Robinson Meyer writes. That holds true for all EV makers, including Tesla, the world’s most valuable auto company. However, its CEO, Elon Musk — who holds an influential position within the government — has said he supports the end of the tax credit “because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, [and] it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance.”
Constellation Energy Corp. held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, announcing that its operating revenue rose more than 10% in the first three months of the year compared to 2024, beating expectations. Shares climbed 12% after the call, with Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez confirming that Constellation’s pending purchase of natural gas and geothermal energy firm Calpine is on track to be completed by the end of the year, and that the nuclear power utility is “working hard to meet the power needs of customers nationwide, including powering the new AI products that Americans increasingly are using in their daily lives and that businesses and government are using to provide better products and services.”
But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Dominguez also threw some “lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections,” telling investors that “it’s not hard to conclude that the headlines are inflated.” As Matthew points out, Dominguez also has some reason to downplay expectations, including that “there needs to be massive investment in new power plants,” which could affect the value of Constellation’s existing generation fleet.
The Rockefeller Foundation aims to phase out 60 coal-fired power plants by 2030 by using revenue from carbon credits to cover the costs of closures, the Financial Times reports. The team working on the initiative has identified 1,000 plants in developing countries that would be eligible for the program under its methodology.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.
Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob dive into what may have caused the Iberian blackout — as well as how grid operators manage supply and demand, voltage and frequency, and renewables and thermal resources, and operate the continent-spanning machine that is the power grid. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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: So a number of people started saying, oh, this was actually caused because there wasn’t enough inertia on the grid — that Spain kind of flew too close to the sun, let’s say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid. Some issue happened and it wasn’t able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that is?
Jesse Jenkins: So I don’t think it’s plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.
So let me break that down: When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there’s an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on just in Spain. They’re connected to this continen- scale grid, and so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France, and it drops a little bit in Latvia and all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time.
Once the system in Iberia disconnected from France, though, now it’s operating on its own as an actual island, and there it has very little inertia because the system operator only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non-inertia-based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn’t seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event.
Something — we don’t know what yet — caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we’ve observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency in Spain before all this happened. And we don’t know exactly what that disturbance was.
There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That’s possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system that manages the automatic response to changes in frequency — they were measuring the wrong thing, and they started to speed up or slow down, or something went wrong. That happened in the past, in the case of a generator in Florida that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong, and that causes caused oscillations of the frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection — as far away as North Dakota, which is like 2,000 miles away, you know? So these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Then again, there are reasons why he’d want to focus on existing generation.
Just how big is the data center boom, really? How much is electricity demand going to expand over the coming decades? Business plans, government policy, and alarming environmental forecasts are all based on the idea that we’re on an unrelenting ride upwards in terms of electricity use, especially from data centers used to power artificial intelligence.
It’s one reason why the new Trump administration declared in the first days of its return to power that the country was in an “energy emergency,” and hasbeen used as a justification for its attempted revival of the coal industry.
But one mildly dissenting voice came from a perhaps-unexpected corner: the power industry.
Constellation Energy’s Chief Executive Officer Joseph Dominguez spent a portion of the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday throwing lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections, even as the company looks to profit from increased demand for the power that its over 30,000-megawatt, largely nuclear fleet serves.
Dominguez told his audience of investors and analysts that utilities and their power customers have been telling Constellation that “the same data center need is being considered in multiple jurisdictions across the United States at the same time, just like fishing. If you’re a fisherman, you put a bunch of lines in the water to try to catch fish, and the data center developers are doing exactly the same thing.”
This means that different electricity markets or utility territories could report the same future data center demand, when ultimately the developer will pick just one site.
Tallying the demand growth projections from a few large power markets — namely MISO, which largely serves the Midwest; PJM, which largely serves the East Coast; and ERCOT, the Texas energy market — which together “account for less than half” of U.S. power demand, Dominguez said, Constellation finds that they project “notably higher” demand growth than many third-party consultants and analysts foresee for the country as a whole.
“It’s hard not to conclude that the headlines are inflated,” Dominguez said. He further claimed that Constellation had “done the math,” and that “if Nvidia were able to double its output and every single chip went to ERCOT, it still wouldn’t be enough chips to support some of the load forecasts.”
He argued that utilities tend to overstate load growth — an observation backed up by research from the Rocky Mountain Institute. “We get it,” he said. “Utilities have to plan to ensure that the system is reliable.” That frequently means erring on the side of having more generation and transmission to serve future demand as opposed to being caught short.
Dominguez is hardly the first voice to call into question load growth forecasts. Energy industry consultant Jonathan Koomey told Heatmap more than a year ago that “everyone needs to calm the heck down” about AI-driven load growth. Data center developers, chipmakers, and AI companies would likely find efficiencies to get more computing power out of less electric power, he predicted, similar to how the original data center buildout avoided catastrophic predictions of imminent power shortages and spiking electricity prices in the early 2000s.
Since then, demand growth projections have done nothing but rise. But even just a few weeks ago, Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, told Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, “It is simultaneously true that I think this is going to be a really large demand driver and that we have bubble-like characteristics in terms of the amount of stuff that people are trying to get done.”
Now, to be clear, Dominguez has a reason to talk down expectations of future demand growth — and with it the expectation that there needs to be massive investment in new power plants. Constellation owns and operates a fleet of nuclear power plants, and is bringing on a gas-heavy fleet with its planned acquisition of Calpine.
Dominguez also said that new natural gas and renewables were likely to prove expensive to build.
“The cost of new entry, whether that be for combined cycle machines or solar with storage, has gone up substantially, as has the time to build and site these assets,” Dominguez said. “Now, at the end of the day, in a tightening market, we compete with the cost of new entry.”
This is halfway consistent with what other big players in the energy industry have been saying. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra, which has a large renewables development business,has been telling anyone who will listen that the way to meet urgent load growth is with renewables and batteries, as they can be built cheaper and faster than natural gas, let alone nuclear.
Dominguez’s take, however, is that it’s all quite expensive and lengthy considering the likely level of need.
“When I listen to some of the comments on these calls, I just have to tell you, folks, I think the load is being overstated. We need to pump the brakes here.”