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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.
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Inside Heatmap’s future of energy security event in D.C.
On Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., Heatmap hosted an evening of discussion on energy innovation and security, featuring special guest Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
Guests at Heatmap's discussion on energy innovation and securityMariah Miranda Photography
We’re in the “era of climate consequences,” Whitehouse told Heatmap senior reporter Jael Holzman. Climate politics has so far largely failed, he said, due to the “malign and corrupting” influence of the fossil fuel industry. Now, things like expensive disaster cleanups and skyrocketing insurance are creating opportunities to talk to voters about climate policy in a new way. And that means largely abandoning the climate politics of the past.
Jael Holtzman and Sheldon WhitehouseMariah Miranda Photography
“The Inflation Reduction Act was fine,” he said. “But nobody believed it put us on a pathway of climate safety. So we have always needed to do more.” Some portions of the IRA may survive the Trump administration’s anti-renewables agenda, particularly those sections that are delivering benefits to Republican-led states, he said. “I think the legislative focus should be on defending that. The parliamentary focus should be on defending that. But the narrative focus shouldn't be on defending that,” Whitehouse said. “The narrative has to move on.”
Senator Whitehouse making a point.Mariah Miranda Photography
Also on Wednesday night, Heatmap CEO and editor in chief Nico Lauricella interviewed Benton Arnett, senior director of markets and policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, which sponsored the event. Their discussion focused on the changing prospects for the nuclear industry. “If we were having this conversation three years ago, we would be talking about which nuclear plant we might shut down next, right?” Arnett said. “It was really a dire time for the industry.”
Nico Lauricella and Benton ArnettMariah Miranda Photography
Today, the industry has benefited from a host of converging positive factors, including rising demand for reliable 24/7 energy sources that has brought investor interest into the space, as well as policy changes and incentives — particularly 45U, the IRA’s tax credit for nuclear energy — that have helped clear away some of the barriers to new nuclear development.
Should we call it a nuclear Renaissance, Lauricella asked? A revival?
“I just call it a good time,” Arnett said.
Nico Lauricella and Benton ArnettMariah Miranda Photography
Guests following the discussionMariah Miranda Photography
Mariah Miranda Photography
Mariah Miranda Photography
Mariah Miranda Photography
Mariah Miranda Photography
Mariah Miranda Photography
Thank you to our sponsors, the Nuclear Energy Institute and the Alliance for Market Solutions, for making the event possible.
The South Korean automaker just opened an EV factory in Georgia. It’ll take a lot longer for others to catch up to Trump’s latest tariffs.
President Trump has introduced yet another round of tariffs that could upend the car industry. The newest volley in his trade war promises to slap an extra 25% tax onto any automobile imported into the U.S. It’s a measure meant to sound like a safeguard for American industry against foreign incursion. The reality, as usual, is a lot more complicated. These tariffs will punish many of the most promising EVs on the market, including those sold by Detroit.
The automotive toll of Trump’s tariffs was startling the last time around, when the administration said it would place a 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, as well as 10% on Chinese imports. That proposal was particularly problematic for the car industry because automakers use a well-established North American production pipeline to reduce costs. Lots of vehicles, whether gasoline, electric, or hybrid, are built in Mexico before being sold in the United States, while plenty of auto parts manufacturing occurs in Canada.
On the electric side, that list of affected vehicles includes the Chevrolet Blazer EV and Equinox EV, as well as the Honda Prologue, which is based on a General Motors platform. All three are strong EV entries by legacy manufacturers trying to grab a chunk of the electric market as industry leader Tesla takes on water amid global rage at Elon Musk. But all three are manufactured at a GM plant in Mexico. So is the Mustang Mach-E, Ford’s flagship EV.
Heatmap has previously highlighted the Equinox, in particular, because the price of its entry-level version — around $35,000 before tax credits — makes it a compelling option for buyers who are shopping on price but interested in going electric. With a price marked up by 25%, it’s no longer competitive with gasoline-powered rivals. The Prologue has found an impressive niche in the market, especially for the many buyers who were waiting for a Honda-badged EV. But its broad appeal may not survive such a markup.
The newest Trump maneuver, a tariff on cars imported from any foreign country, creates another layer of economic chaos for EVs. These rules would target Japanese-made electric cars like the Toyota bZ4x and Subaru Solterra, German-built ones like those from BMW and Mercedes-Benz, and plenty more. Hyundai’s Kona EV, one of the more affordable electric models, is built abroad. Volkswagen moved assembly of its ID.4 electric crossover to Tennessee, but the ID.Buzz, the battery-powered revival of the classic VW bus, is not made in the USA.
Many of those foreign-owned companies were already moving manufacturing to the United States for basic economic reasons, and also to conform to the rules the Biden administration put in place governing eligibility for the $7,500 EV tax credit, which require that many key parts be sourced at home. Toyota and Honda have opened American plants; so have the German automakers. This could help them adjust to a new and convoluted reality. Hyundai’s new Georgia “metaplant” just opened and will produce the Korean automaker’s Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 9 EV crossovers. Its partner brand, Kia, makes the EV6 and EV9 in West Point, Georgia. These Southern factories will have a huge impact on the Korean brands’ ability to survive Trump-era tariffs and maintain their position as the biggest EV challengers to Tesla.
Trump ally Elon Musk stands to benefit most from this move, since Tesla does most of its manufacturing in the United States. Teslas aren’t 100% American; Musk estimates that 20% of what goes into his EVs comes from Mexico, and that the impact of Trump tariffs on Tesla is “not trivial.” This is a dodge. Yes, Tesla would be impacted by the 25% tariffs, but much less so than its rivals. It’s a bit like the EV price wars of a couple years ago, when Musk kept cutting the prices of his cars because he knew how hard it would be for legacy competitors to keep pace. It’s okay to take a punch if your enemies take a bigger one.
The question looming over all of Tesla’s rivals is how to survive this ever-shifting landscape of tariffs and penalties. Changes in the car industry are a long time in the making: It takes years to bring a new vehicle to fruition, to build a new factory, or to retool an old plant so it can manufacture a different vehicle. GM has spent years refitting a Kansas factory that once built the now-retired Chevy Malibu for the purpose of making the revived Bolt EV coming in 2026. It cannot, at the drop of a hat, suddenly begin to source and build the Equinox EV entirely within the borders of the United States of America. That’s why you’ll see plenty of lobbying over the course of the next month as the car industry tries to convince the administration to back off — or, if not that, to at least give their company a tariff exemption.
The impact for potential EV buyers is clear. New car prices will soar by thousands of dollars with Trump tariffs in place. That will be particularly troublesome for EVs, which are staring down the prospect of this administration trying to remove federal tax credits for Americans who buy electric. Used cars — the pathway to EV ownership for those who can’t afford the steep price tag of a new one — will get more expensive, too, thanks to rising demand from those priced out of new vehicles. If you really want to get into an EV, the best bet might be to act right now before any of this madness takes effect in April.
People near the site of the disaster say they’re sick. But officials haven’t recognized any link between those symptoms and the fire.
People say they can still taste the metal from the Moss Landing fire. But no one in the local, state, or federal government is able to say why.
The story of Moss Landing got little attention compared to the scale of the disaster. On January 16 — days before Trump reentered office, and as fires continued to burn in and around Los Angeles, when tempers and attention spans were already strained — the Moss Landing Power Plant ignited. We still don’t know what caused the fire, but we do know a few crucial facts: Nearly all of the batteries at the 300 megawatt facility, one of the world’s largest, burned up in the fire, sending a colossal plume of black smoke soaring up from the site for days.
Two months after the blaze was extinguished, many people who live in the vicinity of Moss Landing, a couple hours south of San Francisco, say they’re still sick from the fire. Community organizers on the ground say the number of sick people is in the hundreds, at least. The symptoms range, but there are a few commonalities. Many report having bloody noses in the days immediately following the fire. In the long weeks that followed, they’ve had headaches that don’t respond to pain medications, rashes that resemble burns, and a recurring metallic taste in their mouths. They all say their symptoms go away if they leave their homes and go further away from the site. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California state regulators have given the all clear.
I have spent weeks trying to get to the bottom of what happened at Moss Landing. I’ve interviewed people who lived in the area and say they’ve experienced breathing issues and other difficulties, many of whom have gathered on Facebook to share photos, stories, and symptoms. Others have offered testimony about these illnesses in public fora and town halls. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against Vistra, the company that runs Moss Landing, over the fire, citing these health issues. Vistra denies the existence of evidence proving pollution from the fire is making people sick, and told me in a statement that the company is “committed to doing everything we can to do right by our community.”
“Moss Landing is not only home to our facility, it’s home to our employees and neighbors,” the statement reads.
And yet, the people say, their symptoms persist. One of the people who told me about their condition is Sheryl Davidson, a former receptionist who lives in the rural nearby town of Prunedale. One of her joys used to be doing Medieval cultural re-enactments, but since the fire she’s been unable to participate.
“My nose just started bleeding. It was traumatic,” she told me. “And I had asthma, but my asthma was miniscule. My whole life, I just had an inhaler. But the inhaler wasn’t working.”
Davidson has other symptoms, including headaches. She says a lump also developed in her face beneath one of her eyes, of which she sent me photos. Despite concerns that something in the air from the fire may have made her sick, she hasn’t left her home, a house she’d lived in since she was a child.
Part of the reason: No one is telling her to leave.
Officials in Monterey County, where Moss Landing is located, acknowledged to me in a statement that they received reports from medical providers that local residents sought care for symptoms related to the battery fire. The EPA said on January 20 that air monitoring throughout the fire incident found no substantial releases of hydrogen fluoride, a fatal pollutant released from battery fires. Records indicate that EPA tested for the particulate matter as well, but there’s no evidence it monitored specifically for heavy metals in the air. Vistra told me it has been doing environmental observations since the incident and is sharing the results with regulators, but said in a statement that it “has not detected risks to public health at this time.”
Davidson may have stayed, but others have left Prunedale, including Brian Roeder, who remembers seeing the fire break out while at home and deciding to leave town with his wife and son out of an abundance of caution. When they got back days later, the fire had been put out. But Roeder told me his wife, who he said is immunocompromised, began reporting breathing issues shortly after they returned. His son started coughing, as well. They quickly left home again, and have been living out of short-term rental apartments far away from the battery plant for weeks.
“This community has been significantly damaged, and they are not coming in to help anybody,” Roeder told me. “There’s been behind the scenes efforts, there’s been some work, but nothing commensurate with the size of this disaster.”
“I know that L.A. caught on fire at the exact same time,” Roeder continued. “That was the huge focus for the state. I know that planes were going down and we had a change in administration. But the fact remains that we, here, cannot explain the absence of support for what is happening from the state. And there’s been a pronounced absence.”
Roeder also started a community organization called Never Again Moss Landing, which has been collecting its own samples of the environment in consultation with a professional lab. In doing so, Roeder became part of a broader effort in the U.S. to create public safeguards for battery storage technology in the wake of Moss Landing. Ground zero for this push is, fittingly, California, where the state Public Utility Commission has responded to the fire by requiring battery storage facility owners to make emergency response plans and adhere to modern fire codes for battery storage.
Some Democratic lawmakers in California want to go further, empowering localities to be the final decisionmakers on whether storage projects get built, as opposed to state regulators.
In some pockets of the U.S., this push for battery safety risks morphing into a threat to the energy transition. For my newsletter, The Fight, I’ve chronicled how towns and counties across the U.S., from New York City to rural Texas, are now banning battery storage, citing the Moss Landing fire and the fear another battery fire could happen in their backyards.
By many metrics, Moss Landing is an outlier. The Moss Landing facility was a giant field of batteries inside a former factory, essentially trapping all these combustible mini-bombs prone to “thermal runaway,” a phenomenon where rising heat from a fire leads to a chain reaction of chemical ignition, inside an insulated box. Concerns about thermal runaway are a reason why almost all battery storage today is installed in storage containers and with an appropriate distance between individual batteries.
But Moss Landing is also a crucial test case for the future of battery storage and public trust.
This morning, the renewables sector took a big stride towards attempting to calm the rage against battery storage. American Clean Power, the leading renewables trade group, released an analysis of 35 battery storage fires in the U.S. from 2012 through the end of last year. Many of the incidents involved “early-generation” battery tech, it said, adding that “improved safety measures, such as advanced thermal management, suppression systems, and containment enclosures, significantly reduc[ed] the likelihood of large-scale incidents.”
The analysis does not speculate as to what may have caused the fire at Moss Landing, simply noting investigations into the incident are ongoing. But at the same time, ACP released a new blueprint for safe battery storage development. In the blueprint, the association acknowledges that some of its recommendations — including a requirement that all battery storage facilities meet a new fire safety standard produced years after Moss Landing was commissioned — are aimed at “holistically addressing concerns generated by the Moss Landing Fire.”
Residents are deeply suspicious of the official assessments denying what, to them, are obvious health impacts. To be candid, I can’t blame them. It strains credulity to imagine a battery fire of this size and scope right next door to you somehow creating no pollution worthy of public concern.
“When you burn [batteries] it moves toxic chemicals into the air,” said Tracey Woodruff, a former EPA senior scientist and policy advisor specializing in chemical contamination of the environment, who now works at the University of California San Francisco. “If this is an uncontrolled burn, you can’t just say there isn’t going to be fallout from that or exposure to the population.”
There’s data making people afraid too. In late January, researchers at San Jose State University alerted the public that they’d discovered “unusually high concentrations of heavy-metal nanoparticles” and a “hundreds- to thousand-fold” increase in nickel, manganese, and cobalt — metals all present in Moss Landing’s batteries — in soil two miles from the power plant in the Elkhorn Slough Reserve, one of the state’s biggest estuaries. Exposure to these metals can cause serious health issues, some of which mirror the symptoms described by residents in the area who are sick.
Exposure to dust with heavy metals can be dangerous at even relatively low levels. A county health advisory shared with local medical professionals in February urged doctors to complete a comprehensive physical of anyone concerned about the impacts of the fire on their health. It noted that breathing or coming into direct skin contact with “heavy metal dusts and other particulate matter from smoke” can result in a metallic taste and difficulty breathing, as well as exacerbate underlying conditions like asthma.
Discovering the metals’ omnipresence in the Slough after the fire led Ivano Aiello, a researcher at SJSU who collected that data, to conclude that the contamination is probably more widespread than is publicly understood.
“I freaked out [after the study] because I was breathing the stuff. I was out there for days and I had no idea,” he told me. “Then I alerted the authorities … and they did their own investigation.”
Subsequent studies conducted by county and state environmental officials, including within the Elkhorn Slough, found no level of these heavy metals that they said could be conclusively tied to the fire. On March 19, farm advisors at the University of California Cooperative Extension undertook a “limited study” that found a “slight deposition of metals (copper and manganese) may have occurred in one agricultural field closest to the battery fire site,” but that the “concentration of metals measured were within normal ranges for all soil types evaluated.” Dole, the giant produce company, which has operations in the area, told me that on its end “no health impacts have been reported and no soil contamination has been detected as a result of the Moss Landing battery fire.”
But Roeder and many other members of the surrounding communities are worried there isn’t enough testing being done to find out whether contaminants entered the atmosphere, especially since air pollution is rarely spread evenly. Like Covid-19, the only way we will ever know the extent of the problem is with more testing, testing, testing.
Roeder is trying to do this work himself. On what he says is his own dime, he and other members of Never Again Moss Landing have collected dust samples across the region in consultation with a credentialed lab in the state, BioMax, which he told me reached out after the fire.
On Wednesday, a local NBC affiliate reported that Don Smith, a toxicologist at the University of California San Diego, confirmed elevated levels of nickel, cobalt, and manganese in the dust samples collected by Never Again Moss Landing. “There is reason to be concerned,” Smith told the TV station, adding that people living near the plant should wear masks regularly if they’re interacting with dust in their homes and be careful not to disturb soil in their yards. “Both manganese and, to a lesser extent, cobalt are known to be neurotoxins. And nickel, of course, is recognized as a carcinogen.”
Frustratingly, though, there is no solid proof to date of a conclusive link between the illnesses and metal exposure — just a lot of people with symptoms, a study that hasn’t been replicated in other pieces of research, and samples collected by residents who are also involved in litigation against the company. Still, that’s a lot of evidence of a problem. Medical mysteries are also common in environmental catastrophes like the Flint water crisis and the infamous DuPont PFOA debacle in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in which obviously sick residents butted heads with regulators for years, demanding information and testing.
What’s next for Moss Landing? The three counties most impacted — Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito — just concluded a community health survey that solicited comments from potentially impacted residents and received more than 1,500 responses, according to figures I reviewed that were shared at a recent Monterey County public meeting. When that study is out, we’ll have a comprehensive view of the locations where the sick live to see where it lines up with the plume that emitted from Moss Landing.
Taking a wider view, any society that’s going to rely primarily on intermittent energy sources like solar and wind needs battery storage to keep the lights on. That will require winning the public’s trust in battery technology. The Moss Landing fire was bad, and over time risks becoming an East Palestine moment for the energy transition. But the lack of a loud, sizable government response to calm the nerves of people publicly claiming illness is likely to be even more damaging to the future of the battery sector.