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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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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images