You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Mr. President, your commitment to radical climate and economic policy really does astound me.
Dear Mr. Trump,
What can I say? You astound me. You enthrall me. I am, in short, very impressed!
Why? Well, earlier this month, I sent you an open letter in which I confessed that I finally understood your secret plan. It’s true, I wrote, that you campaigned as a scourge of climate activists. You publicly called global warming a “hoax,” a “scam,” and something that you “don’t believe.”
Sure, that’s what you said. But, as I wrote in my letter, you have governed very differently. You are clearly terrified of climate change. Because upon being handed the reins of power, you have executed the extreme environmentalist playbook to a T.
You imposed a 10% tax on Canadian crude oil — which is the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive oil burned by Americans. You levied new fees on single-family-home building materials, putting an end to suburban sprawl. You even threatened to tax cars.
In short, you seemed to declare war on the dirty, polluting, carbon-choked American way of life.
Yet even as I sent that letter, I still had doubts. I even added a note of warning. I said that you are a much more radical environmentalist than I am — that while I want to see carbon emissions fall, I would never take the kind of extreme actions you are.
But since my last note you have plunged on. In the past few days, we’ve gotten new confirmation of just how committed you are to the radical climate agenda. You have taxed oil imports. You have declared war on cars like some kind of radical urbanist. You have hawked Teslas on the White House lawn. Even your diplomatic fights are bearing fruit: Your trade war on Canada has led to cross-border air travel falling by 70%, and your anti-European rhetoric has even started to drive down trans-Atlantic bookings now. Less tourism, fewer flights, less carbon pollution!
Last time, I called you a “Green New Donald.” Clearly that did not go far enough. You are even more opinionated, climate-crusading, and radical than I thought. You are committed to reducing the amount of stuff that Americans use — no matter where we get it from or what it does. You want to decrease the economy’s material intensity.
You, Mr. Trump, are a DEGROWTH DONALD.
And the fossil fuel industry is just starting to catch on to the extent of your fervor.
How do I know? Just look at what the oil industry itself is saying. Every quarter, the Dallas Federal Reserve asks fossil fuel executives about the state of their industry. The most recent survey came out on Wednesday, and in it those leaders do nothing but whine. They hate that you are going much further than President Biden ever went — that you are trying to drag them into bankruptcy.
“The key word to describe 2025 so far is ‘uncertainty’ and as a public company, our investors hate uncertainty. This has led to a marked increase in the implied cost of capital of our business, with public energy stocks down significantly more than oil prices over the last two,” one of them writes.
Well done, Mr. Trump! Democrats like Elizabeth Warren have long sought to raise borrowing costs for oil and gas companies through financial regulation. But you have figured out a way to actually do it with your tariff agenda.
One of the most impressive parts of your energy agenda, Mr. Trump, is that you keep calling for oil to fall to $50 a barrel. (It now trades at $69.) You must know — because you are surrounded by expert oilmen such as Energy Secretary Chris Wright — that such a low price will hand market share to OPEC and cause American oil companies nothing but pain. You must have seen that in the same Fed survey, U.S. drillers said that oil had to go for at least $61 a barrel before they could profitably drill new wells in the Permian Basin.
But you and your advisers plunge on anyway and keep insisting on that magic $50 number! You are heroes. What’s so delightful, Mr. Trump, is that this is clearly starting to irritate the oil executives who helped fund your campaign. Some of them have even started to cut their spending on future oil drilling.
“The threat of $50 oil prices by the administration has caused our firm to reduce its 2025 and 2026 capital expenditures,” writes one of them. “‘Drill, baby, drill’ does not work with $50 per barrel oil. Rigs will get dropped, employment in the oil industry will decrease, and U.S. oil production will decline as it did during COVID-19.”
Another adds: “There cannot be ‘U.S. energy dominance’ and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory. At $50-per-barrel oil, we will see U.S. oil production start to decline immediately and likely significantly.”
Perfectly executed, Mr. Trump! They are going to keep it in the ground!!!! You have pulled off the rare rope-a-dope: Your political action groups raised more than $75 million from the oil industry to help get you elected. But now that you’re in office, you’re shutting them in. And the best part is that voters have no idea: Americans continue to think that you support U.S. oil and gas drilling — and they like it.
The most impressive comment from the oil executives, though, is this one: “I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career.”
Think about that. This executive has seen the fall of Communism, the Asian crash, 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, and the pandemic — and all of them pale next to you.
At the same time that these oil leaders are whining, you have plunged ahead with your tariffs on cars. These new fees are so complicated that many automakers are still working out exactly what they will mean for their supply chains. (More uncertainty! You dazzle me.)
But one thing is clear: They are going to raise the cost of new vehicles. “You're going to see price increases,” Ivan Drury, the director of insights at automotive research site Edmunds, toldUSA Today. “Virtually nothing goes unscathed.”
One analyst at Goldman Sachs even predicted that soon the average monthly price for a new vehicle could rise by $90. He said the tariffs are so unbelievably disruptive that there is no way they could become permanent. The hit to auto demand has already caused the steelmaker Cleveland Cliffs to lay off more than 600 steelworkers.
Mr. Trump, you really do impress me. I do worry about your popularity, though. I mean, are you trying to cause mass layoffs across the auto sector? If you keep this up, you might put the Democrats back in office — and you know what will happen then. I mean, last year, the U.S. produced more oil than any other country in history. I know you don’t want to see that happen again.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”