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Here are the most important climate policies left on the president’s to-do list.
If President Biden chose to sit on his hands for the remainder of his term, he would already have done far more to address climate change than any of his predecessors. But he still has a bunch of unfinished business — half-completed rules that will need to be finalized — that could go a long way toward making sure his initial achievements pay off. And he’s only got a few more months to get it done.
The most consequential items on his to-do list are finalizing two sets of regulations that his administration proposed last spring. The first would require most new cars sold in the U.S., and one-quarter of new heavy-duty trucks, to be electric by 2032; the second would drive more rapid reductions of emissions from the power sector and encourage a shift to renewables. The problem is that if the rules aren’t finalized by the end of this spring, they will be vulnerable to repeal if Republicans win a trifecta in Washington in the fall.
Biden’s biggest climate wins to date have been in the form of incentives, not requirements. The Inflation Reduction Act, the crowning achievement of his presidency, has made hundreds of billions of dollars available to build renewable energy and lower the cost of electric vehicles. Economic modeling by the Rhodium Group, a clean energy research firm, shows that these voluntary incentives make renewable energy so cost-effective that electricity-related emissions could decline by up to 75% from today’s levels by 2035 and transportation emissions could drop by up to 32%.
The operative word, however, is “voluntary.” Just because clean energy and electric vehicles are cheaper doesn’t mean they’ll be adopted with any urgency. Models assume the world optimizes for the best economic outcome, when in reality, there are many non-monetary factors at play — including, simply, resistance to change. The EPA’s rules are a backstop — they are the “sticks” to complement the “carrots” of the IRA.
“The incentives and the standards reinforce one another,” David Doniger, director of the climate and clean energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “You can't be sure you'll get the results with just the incentives. And at the same time, the incentives buy down the costs of the standards that lock in the results. So it's a very good combination.”
Many environmental groups say the EPA proposals need to be strengthened before they are finalized. “Even if Biden gets elected into the second term, we won’t have the opportunity to open up these rules again,” Rachel Patterson, the deputy policy director of Evergreen Action, told me. For example, only certain kinds of new natural gas plants are covered by the rules, whereas the group wants to see all new fossil fuel plants covered. It is also pushing the agency to require a more rapid transition to electric heavy duty trucks — or at least one in line with rules already in place in California.
Patterson said these rules aren’t just urgent from a climate perspective. “Getting dirty vehicles off the road is going to improve people's lives through cleaner air, through reduced pollution and health impacts. The same goes for clean power rules.”
The EPA’s most recent timetable shows the agency finalizing the car and truck standards in March and the power plant rules in April.
There’s a number of other ways that Biden could cement his climate legacy in the coming months. His Securities and Exchange Commission, led by Gary Gensler, has proposed climate reporting standards that would require public companies to disclose information to investors about their emissions and vulnerabilities to climate-related risks — these have yet to be finalized.
The number of programs in the Inflation Reduction Act is vast and the money is barely out the door. Patterson said Evergreen wants to see the administration getting the word out about the funding and providing technical assistance to states and communities to make sure these programs get fully taken advantage of.
It has also become increasingly clear that a transformation of the power sector is contingent on reforms to permitting processes and better planning for transmission infrastructure. Biden will need the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to finalize rules that require electric grid operators to incorporate clean energy policies into their planning.
At stake is not just Biden’s legacy, but the country’s commitment to the rest of the world to halve emissions by 2030 — a goal that will help prevent the most disastrous climate outcomes.
“You can see the price we're paying,” Doniger said. “2023 was the hottest year ever, filled with climate driven disasters which killed people and cost gazillions of dollars. There's no reason not to expect more of the same in 2024 and looking out ahead unless we finally clamp down on emissions.”
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It’s not just AI companies taking a beating today.
It’s not just tech stocks that are reeling after the release of Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, which performs similarly to state-of-the-art models from American companies while using less expensive hardware far more efficiently. Energy and infrastructure companies — whose share prices had soared in the past year on the promise of powering a massive artificial intelligence buildout — have also seen their stock prices fall early Monday.
Shares in GE Vernova, which manufactures turbines for gas-fired power plants, were down 19% in early trading Monday. Since the company’s spinoff from GE last April, the share price had risen almost 200% through last Friday, largely based on optimism about its ability to supply higher electricity demand. Oklo, the advanced nuclear company backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, is down 25%, after rising almost 300% in the past year. Constellation Energy, the independent power producer that’s re-powering Three Mile Island in partnership with Microsoft, saw its shares fall almost 20% in early trading. It had risen almost 190% in the year prior to Monday.
“DeepSeek’s power implications for AI training punctures some of the capex euphoria which followed major commitments from Stargate and Meta last week,” Jefferies infrastructure analyst Graham Hunt and his colleagues wrote in a note to clients Monday. “With DeepSeek delivering performance comparable to GPT-4 for a fraction of the computing power, there are potential negative implications for the builders, as pressure on AI players to justify ever increasing capex plans could ultimately lead to a lower trajectory for data center revenue and profit growth.”
Investors fear that the proliferation of cheaper, more efficient models may hurt the prospects of technology companies — and their suppliers — that are spending tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence investments.
Just last week, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, announced huge new investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Altman’s OpenAI is part of Stargate, the joint venture with Microsoft and SoftBank that got a splashy White House-based announcement and promises to invest $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure. There was already some skepticism of these numbers, with Altman-nemesis Elon Musk charging that certain members would be unable to fulfill their ends of the deal, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told CNBC from Davos, “I’m good for my $80 billion.”
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, said late last week that his company was building a data center “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” which would require 2 gigawatts of electricity to power. (For scale, reactors 3 and 4 of the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia are a little over 1 gigawatt each.) He also said that Meta had planned up to $65 billion of capital expenditure this year.
These escalating announcements have been manna to investors in any company that provides the building blocks for large artificial intelligence systems — namely chips and energy, with companies like Nvidia, the chip designer, and power companies and energy infrastructure companies posting some of the best stock market performances last year.
But exactly how cheaper artificial intelligence plays out in terms of real investment remains to be seen. Late Sunday night Redmond, Washington-time, Nadella posted a link on X to the Wikipedia page for Jevons Paradox. The idea dates from 19th century Britain, and posits that increased efficiency in using a resource (in Jevons’ case, coal) could actually accelerate its depletion, as the resource becomes cheaper for the same economic output, encouraging more use of it (in Jevons’ case, iron).
“Jevons paradox strikes again!,” Nadella wrote. “As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.”
Investors in chips and energy companies are hoping that’s the case; at least so far, the market doesn’t appear to agree.
And it just raised a $20 million round of Series B funding.
A century ago, prospectors tromped through remote areas, hoping to spot valuable, mineralized rocks simply poking out of the ground. Eventually, after they found all of the obvious stuff, they progressed to doing airborne geophysical surveys that used tools such as electromagnetic sensing to identify minerals that were just below the surface or highly concentrated. But there’s always been a lot more out there than we had the mechanisms to find. So now, companies are training artificial intelligence models on heaps of historical data to help locate untouched reserves of minerals that are key to clean energy technologies such as electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines.
One of the biggest players in this space is Earth AI, a Sydney-based startup that today announced a $20 million Series B round, bringing the company’s total investment to over $38 million since its founding in 2017. While the company had initially sought to raise $15 million in this round, investor interest was so strong that it exceeded its target by $5 million. Lead investors were Tamarack Global and Cantos Ventures.
Earth AI has a two-stage business model. First, it uses its proprietary software to locate likely deposits and purchases the mineral rights to the land. Then, it sends in its drilling rig and in-house team of geologists to produce mineral samples. The team then shows these samples to mining companies to prove that the area warrants further development and — assuming the miners are interested — sells them the mineral rights. “Because of the scarcity of this, because of the deficit of where we are and where we’re going, these price tags are $500 million to $2.5 billion,” Monte Hackett, Earth AI’s chief financial officer, told me. Huge as that may sound, it’s much less than what a mining company would typically spend doing traditional exploration themselves.This latest funding will allow the startup to purchase additional drill rigs and increase its project pipeline to over 50 sites.
“The problem is obvious,” Hackett told me. “We need $10 trillion of critical metal production by 2050. We’re producing $320 billion, a $9.7 trillion shortfall.” To better locate the trillions of dollars worth of minerals necessary for the energy transition, the startup’s CEO, geoscientist Roman Teslyuk, digitized decades of old Australian geophysical survey data, then overlaid that with remote sensing data such as satellite imagery to train a model to recognize the Earth systems and geological processes that created minerals deposits millennia ago. “Another way I like to think about it is that our algorithm looks for the geological shadow that is cast by a dense mineral body,” Hackett explained in a follow-up email.
Hackett told me that Earth AI focuses specifically on “greenfield” applications — that is, areas where no mining activity or substantial minerals exploration has previously occurred. So far, the company’s discoveries include a significant deposit of palladium, which also contains platinum and nickel, as well as a gold deposit and a molybdenum deposit. “We’re finding things that go against what has been the common sense of the industry so far,” Hackett told me, referencing the company’s palladium discovery. “There was geological consensus that there was no platinum palladium on the East Coast of Australia, and our algorithm learned what it looked like on the West Coast and then identified it on the East Coast.”
While Hackett said Earth AI is open for business anywhere, right now all of its projects are in Australia, where the company has “600 ‘x’s on our treasure map” — that is, likely areas for deposits, Hackett wrote in a follow-up email. Outlining the advantages of doing business there, he explained, “We don’t have to go somewhere where there’s unsavory working conditions or there are issues where we have to put our principles into balance. Here, everything is very regulated and above board.” Plus, mining has long been an important component of the Australian economy. “They’re incredibly efficient at doing this well. So the timeline for development is the shortest compared to other places,” Hackett explained.
This tech could have important domestic implications too, though. As the newly-inaugurated President Trump prioritizes ramping up U.S. production of critical minerals, Earth AI could one day help locate deposits here, as well. And since Australia is a close American ally, the nation could play a key role in helping wean the U.S. off of Chinese imports, providing the U.S. with critical minerals that it can’t now, or perhaps ever, produce in sufficient quantities itself.
On disaster relief, rain in California, and solar power
Current conditions: Storm Herminia could bring fresh flooding to England and Wales, just days after Storm Éowyn • A giant iceberg is on a collision course with the island of South Georgia in the Atlantic Ocean • Phoenix, Arizona, might see rain today for the first time in 156 days.
President Trump signed an executive order establishing a review council to assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and said the agency needs to be “drastically” improved. The council will have no more than 20 members, and will include department heads as well as people from outside the government that are appointed by Trump himself. “These non-Federal members shall have diverse perspectives and expertise in disaster relief and assistance, emergency preparedness, natural disasters, Federal-State relationships, and budget management,” the order states. This new council will be tasked with scrutinizing the agency’s disaster relief efforts and making recommendations for improvement. Trump has slammed FEMA and the prior administration for their responses to recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Helene and the wildfires in Los Angeles. Misinformation and conspiracy theories – often floated by Republican politicians and rightwing figureheads – spread quickly in the wake of both emergencies. The executive order insists there are “serious concerns of political bias in FEMA.” While touring hurricane damage in North Carolina a few days ago, Trump suggested “getting rid of” FEMA altogether, although that would require some help from Congress. The Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation has recommended that FEMA be removed from the Department of Homeland Security, and that programs like the National Flood Insurance Program be privatized.
Rainstorms have prompted flooding alerts in parts of Los Angeles that have been left charred by recent large wildfires. The downpours are helping firefighters get a handle on the blazes that remain, with the Palisades, Eaton, and Huges fires all more than 90% contained. But the city is on edge: Too much rain could trigger landslides and flooding around burn scars. A flood advisory is in effect around the Palisades fire burn scar, and areas surrounding the Eaton fire burn scar are also on high alert. The rain could also bring “toxic runoff” – rainwater laced with the chemicals leftover from burned objects like cars and furniture. Workers have been putting improvised filters over storm drains to try to trap pollutants. The worst of the rain was expected Sunday night and Monday.
In case you missed it: The Department of Interior issued an order suspending the ability of its staff, except a few senior officials, to permit new renewables projects on public land. The document suspended the authority of “Department Bureaus and Offices” over a wide range of regular actions, including issuing “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.” The suspension lasts for 60 days and can only be overridden by “a confirmed or Acting official” in a number of senior roles in the Department, including the secretary. “This step will restrict energy development, which will harm consumers and fail to meet growing electricity demand,” Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for American Clean Power, the clean energy trade group, told Heatmap in an email. “We need an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy, not just a ‘some-of-the-above’ approach.”
President Trump has also requested that the Supreme Court pause all pending litigation on environmental cases, including one focusing on California’s EPA waiver to set and enforce its own vehicle emissions standards. Sources toldReuters the administration has also reassigned four Justice Department attorneys that focus on environmental issues, so that the government “speaks with one voice.”
U.S. power generation growth will be led mostly by new solar power additions over the next two years, according to the Energy Information Agency. It expects 26 gigawatts of solar to be added in 2025, down from 37 GW in 2024. Wind power additions are expected to increase by about 8 GW this year, but honestly, who knows. Meanwhile, 6% of coal generating capacity will be removed this year as coal plants are retired. U.S. energy consumption is expected to continue growing at its current rate of about 2% per year through 2026, which would mark the first three years of consecutive growth since the early 2000s.
Energy Information Agency
Here’s a little bit of good news to start the week: Trade group data suggests that air-source heat pump sales outpaced those of gas furnaces by 37% in the U.S. last year – or at least through November. If confirmed, that would be the widest margin recorded, much bigger than last year’s 21%. “The data comes with a notable caveat,” Canary Mediacautioned. “Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces, but that doesn’t necessarily mean more households are choosing heat pumps over gas heating; homes often need multiple heat pump units to replace a single fossil fuel-fired appliance.”
“We spend a lot of time talking about short-term financials, but we’re building a business for the next few decades. So, eh, who cares? It’s going to be a little more challenging the next couple of years.”
–Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe speaking toInsideEVs about whether Trump’s policies will affect his EV company