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From the outrage factory that brought you Joe Biden’s War on Gas Stoves comes a new hit just in time for summer: Joe Biden’s War on Dishwashers.
Late last week, the Department of Energy announced new efficiency standards for household dishwashers, the result of a congressionally mandated regulatory review that nevertheless has sent conservative media into a tizzy. “As usual with environmentalist crusades, the target is poorly chosen and the ‘solution’ is likely to aggravate people, with no benefit to the planet,” The National Review slammed. Fox Business complained that the “war on appliances continues.” The Daily Mail deployed its signature scare caps to blare that “now Biden is going after your DISHWASHERS.” From the trenches, Reason wearily dispatched that “Joe Biden’s War on Dishwashers Rages On.”
When a commissioner for the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose job it is to make sure the stuff in our house doesn’t kill us, pointed out last January that maaaaybe having methane-leaking gas stoves in our kitchens isn’t the healthiest of ideas, a similar conservative firestorm had also ensued. Never mind that a federal “ban” was never actually on the table: right-wingers and honorary right-wingers alike tripped over each other to profess that they love their gas stoves the most.
I even sort of get it! A Wolf Gas Range is pretty sexy. But a Miele Lumen Ecoflex dishwasher is … not. In America, chefs are celebrities and gas is the aspirational cooktop featured on many a food and home renovation show; even refrigerators have become show-offy status symbols. But the humble dishwasher is tasked with handling our messes once the Instagramable #foodporn has been scraped away. Why, then, is right-leaning media acting like a SWAT team is posed to bust through our windows and spirit away our outdated dishwashers when we didn’t even realize we were supposed to love them in the first place?
The answer is that “news purveyors” have what Intelligencer calls “a strong incentive to keep consumers in a constant state of agitation” with “new fights that touch on such existential questions as who we are as Americans” since these “tend to light up amygdalae better than old, stuffy arguments over … jobs, wages, and the rising cost of living.” What this means in practice, though, is that the battle lines have been drawn before there are any battles to be had. “Americans with conservative views came to see driving a gas-guzzler, eating meat, and other climate-unfriendly practices as salient to their political and cultural identities,” explains The New Republic, “while recycling, eating vegan, and other environmental habits became coded as coastal leftist habits.” In other words, dishwashers have been recruited into the ongoing culture wars — because energy efficient = bad! — and may now take their seat somewhere between “masks” and “drag queen story hours.”
The dishwasher battle is especially supercharged, though, because former President Donald Trump has taken a keen personal interest in it. During a 2019 rally now best remembered for the president’s rant about not being able to flush his toilet, Trump also took aim at energy-efficient dishwashers: “Remember the dishwasher, you press it?” he’d regaled his audience. “Boom, there’d be like an explosion, five minutes later, you open it, the steam pours out, the dishes. Now you press it 12 times, women tell me. Again. You know, they give you four drops of water. And they’re in places where there’s so much water they don’t know what to do with it.” If you parsed that, congratulations.
A year later, Trump confirmed he’d lifted the “burdensome regulations” on dishwashers and subsequently boasted on the campaign trail that “now you can buy a dishwasher and it comes out beautiful.” (I, for one, don’t believe the former president has ever done dishes in his life — “now you press it 12 times, women tell me”??? — but I digress).
In truth, Trump actually hadn’t lifted a regulation on dishwashers so much as he’d written a new one, Wirecutter points out. Under Trump’s watch, the Department of Energy introduced a whole new product class for special dishwashers that run on short cycles, which are hyper-fast and usually energy- and water-intensive. These new speedy dishwashers wouldn’t be regulated and therefore could use unlimited water and energy. Huzzah! Only, hilariously, manufacturers didn’t exactly rush to make these new machines (the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, an industry interest group, actually opposed them), and Biden eventually closed the silly little loophole.
The rules proposed by the Biden administration last week build on the Trump-era rollback by further calling for “conventional household dishwashers made in or imported into the U.S. as soon as 2027 … to use 27% less power and 34% less water — no more than 3.3 gallons during their normal, default cycles,” Bloomberg reports. “Normal, default cycles” is the key term here because it’s actually the only dishwasher mode that the government restricts; “short cycle” modes are still allowed on dishwashers sold in the U.S., and aren’t regulated by the new rules. The short cycles just can’t be the default modes on the appliances. Surprisingly, this actually makes a huge difference: A Consumer Reports survey found most people don’t actually push the “short cycle” button, and only 6% of people use it “most of the time.” Even with short-cycle options available on all future dishwashers, the DOE still expects its new regulations to amount to $3 billion in utility bill savings over 30 years, reduce CO2 emissions by 12.5 million metric tons, and save 240 billion gallons of water.
So what are conservatives so upset about? One complaint is that energy-efficient dishwashers take too long to run, and while it’s true many cycles top two hours, there is, again, still a short cycle option available on some machines if you want it (though what’s the rush? You’re in a hurry to unload the dishwasher?). There is also Trump’s complaint that energy-efficient dishwashers aren’t as effective at cleaning as energy-sucking ones, though “several of today’s models that already meet the [newly] proposed efficiency standards have five-star cleaning performance ratings from Consumer Reports,” the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP), an organization that advocates for more energy-efficient appliances, pointed out in a recent statement. Wirecutter likewise concluded that “crappy cleaning performance and long cycles aren’t an inevitable outcome of efficiency standard” and “if your dishwasher is slow and sucks (and a better detergent doesn’t fix the problem), blame the company that built it.”
Well, how about the cost, then? A representative from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, the aforementioned industry interest group, told Reason that “we’re seeing costs of new products going up dramatically” due to new energy regulations, but Bloomberg reports that the DOE estimates consumers will only pay “an extra $15 for a new standard-sized dishwasher but could take in potentially three times that in reduced operating costs over the device’s lifetime.” ASAP additionally notes that “most dishwashers that don’t yet meet the proposed standard could be modified to do so by making changes in their programming, rather than physical design modifications,” meaning lagging manufacturers don’t need to start from scratch, either.
Of course, rational arguments about the new standards aren’t really the point. The fury is because the Biden administration has the audacity to do something that kind of sort of maybe could be called “regulatory overreach” if you’re totally unmoored from reality. Again, these standards were required to be reviewed by the DOE, hadn’t been updated since 2012, and the vast majority of dishwashers on the market require only simple programming tweaks to comply with the standards if they don’t already. This isn’t going to ruin anyone’s kitchen, much less their life. But in today’s political environment, it all somehow still means war.
Just don’t tell the conservative rabble-rousers that the same DOE energy efficiency proposal for dishwashers also cracks down on another familiar piece of large equipment.
Otherwise a “War on Vending Machines” will be next.
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It’s already conquered solar, batteries, and EVs. With a $2 billion new turbine factory in Scotland, it may have set its next target.
Batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles. The story of renewable energy deployment globally is increasingly one of China’s fiercely competitive domestic industries and deep supply chains exporting their immense capacity globally. Now, it may be wind’s turn.
The Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced last week that it plans to invest $2 billion in a factory in Scotland. The facility is scheduled to start production in late 2028, churning out offshore wind equipment for use in the United Kingdom, which has over 15 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, as well as for export, likely in Europe.
The deal comes as China finds itself at a kind of domestic clean energy crossroads, in terms of both supply and demand. On the former, the country has launched a campaign aimed at softening the cutthroat domestic competition, overproduction, and price wars that have defined many of its green industries, especially electric vehicles.
At the same time, China is setting out to alter its electricity markets to put renewable energy on a more market-based footing, while also paying coal-fired power plants to stay on the grid, as University of California, San Diego researcher Michael Davidson explained on a recent episode of Shift Key. These changes in electricity markets will reduce payments to solar and wind producers, making foreign markets potentially more attractive.
“We anticipate Chinese original equipment manufacturers will intensify their push toward international expansion, with Mingyang’s planned investment a signal of this trend,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note to clients. “This poses a challenge for Western incumbents, as Chinese players can capitalize on their cost advantages in a market driven by price.”
Ironically, Fulop said, the market changes will make the Chinese market more like Europe’s, which has become more price conscious as the market has matured and reductions in cost have slowed or outright stopped. “The transition is expected to make renewable developers increasingly price-sensitive as they seek to preserve project returns, ultimately weighing on wind turbine manufacturers’ profitability,” he wrote.
There’s a “cliff” coming in Chinese renewable energy deployment, Kyle Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, told me. “Overall, the net effect is expected to be a pretty sharp drop, and we’re already starting to see some of the effects of that.”
And turbine manufacturers would not be the first Chinese renewable industry to show up in Europe.
“There’s already an existing model” for Chinese manufacturers to set up shop in Western countries, Chan said. Chinese companies are already planning to manufacture solar modules in France, while Chinese EV maker BYD’s is planning factories in Hungary, Turkey, and potentially Spain.
China as a whole is responsible for over half of all new offshore wind capacity added in 2024, according to Global Energy Monitor, and has been growing at a 41% annual rate for the past five years. The energy intelligence firm Rystad estimates that China will make up 45% of all offshore wind capacity by 2030. Ming Yang itself claims to be behind almost a third of new offshore wind capacity built last year.
Meanwhile, offshore wind projects in the West — especially the United States — have faced the omnicrisis of high interest rates, backed-up supply chains, and Donald Trump. News of Ming Yang’s Scotland factory sent yet another shock through the ailing Western offshore wind market, with shares in the Danish company Vestas down 4% when the market opened Monday.
But with Chinese products and Chinese investment comes controversy and nerves among European political leaders. “There’re questions about tech transfer and job creation,” Chan said. “They also face some security issues and potential political backlash.”
In August, the German asset manager Luxcara announced that it would use Siemens Gamesa turbines for a planned offshore wind project instead of Ming Yang ones after backlash from German defense officials. “We see this as further evidence that a Chinese entry into the European wind market remains challenging,” analysts at Jefferies wrote to clients in August.
They were right to be skeptical — Chinese turbines’ entry into the European market has been long predicted and yet remains unrealized. “China’s increasingly cheap wind turbines could open new markets,” S&P Global Insights wrote in 2022, citing the same cost advantages as Morningstar did in reference to the Ming Yang factory announcement.
“China was already trying to angle into the European market,” Chan told me, seeing it as comparable to the U.S. in size and potentially more open to Chinese investment. “If they were kind of thinking about it before, now it’s gotten a greater sense of commercial urgency because I think the expectation is that their profit margins are really going to get squeezed.”
While China leads the world in building out renewable energy capacity domestically and exporting technology abroad, it has “decided not to decide” on pursuing a rapid, near-term decarbonization, Johns Hopkins University China scholar Jeremy Wallace recently argued in Heatmap.
While that means that the Paris Agreement goals are even farther out of reach, it may be fine for Chinese industries, including wind, as they look to sell abroad.
“Chinese firms have lots of reasons to want to build things abroad: Diversification away from the Chinese market, the zero or negative profits from selling domestically, and geopolitical balancing,” Wallace told me.
“If Brits want to have their citizens making the turbines that will power the country,” Wallace said, “this seems like a reasonable opportunity.”
Current conditions: A major Pacific storm is drenching California and bringing several inches of snow to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming • A tropical storm in the Atlantic dumped nearly a foot of water on South Carolina over three days • Algeria is roasting in temperatures of more than 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Department of Energy notified workers in multiple offices Friday that they were likely to be fired or reassigned to another part of the agency, E&E News reported Tuesday. Staffers at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of State and Community Energy Programs received notices stating that the offices would “be undergoing a major reorganization and your position may be reassigned to another organization, transferred to another function or abolished.” Still, the notice said “no determination has been made concerning your specific position” just yet.
At least five offices received “general reduction in force notices,” as opposed to official notification of a reduction in force, according to a Latitude Media report. These included the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of State and Community Energy Plans, and the Office of Fossil Energy. Nearly 200 Energy Department employees received direct layoff notices.
Catastrophic floods brought on by the remnants of a typhoon devastated the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk on Sunday. Five months ago, the Trump administration canceled a $20 million grant intended to protect the community against exactly this kind of extreme flooding, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The grant from the Environmental Protection Agency was meant to stabilize the riverbank on which Kipnuk is built. But in May, the agency yanked back the Biden-era grant, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said was “no longer consistent” with the government’s priorities. In a post on X, Zeldin said the award was part of "wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants,” suggesting the funding was part of an ideological push for diversity, equity, and inclusion rather than a practical infrastructure boost to an Indigenous community facing serious challenges.
Zealan Hoover, a Biden-era senior adviser at the EPA, accused Zeldin of using “inflammatory rhetoric” that misrepresented the efforts in places like Kipnuk. “For decades, E.P.A. has been a partner to local communities,” Hoover said. “For the first time under this administration, E.P.A. has taken an aggressively adversarial posture toward the very people and communities that it is intended to protect.”
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Late last Thursday, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman observed that the status of the 6.2-gigawatt Esmeralda 7, the nation’s largest solar project, had changed on the Bureau of Land Management’s website to “canceled.” The news sent shockwaves nationwide and drew blowback even from Republicans, including Utah Governor Spencer Cox, as I reported in this newsletter. Now, however, the bureau’s parent agency is denying that it made the call to cancel the project. “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Utility Dive. “Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
That means the project could still move forward with a piecemeal approach to permitting rather than one overarching approval, which aligns with what one of the developers involved told Jael last week. A representative for NextEra said that it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and that the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.” Still, the move represents a devastating setback for the solar installation, which may never fully materialize.
Ethane exports are rising as export capacity soars.EIA
U.S. exports of ethane, a key petrochemical feedstock extracted from raw natural gas during processing, are on track for “significant growth” through 2026, according to new analysis from the Energy Information Administration. Overseas sales are projected to grow 14% this year compared to the previous year, and another 16% next year. Ethane is mostly used as a feedstock for ethylene, a key ingredient in plastics, resins, and synthetic rubber. China has been the fastest growing source of demand for American ethane in recent years, rising to the largest single destination with 47% of exports last year.
Spain’s electricity-grid operator shrugged off concerns of another major blackout after detecting two sharp voltage variations in recent weeks. Red Electrica, which operates Spain’s grid, said that what The Wall Street Journal described as “recent voltage swings” didn’t threaten to knock out the grid because they stayed within acceptable limits. But the operator warned that variations could jeopardize the electricity supply if the grid didn’t overhaul its approach to managing a system that increasingly relies on intermittent, inverter-based generating sources such as solar panels. Red, which is 20% owned by the Spanish government, acknowledged that the high penetration of renewables was responsible for the recent fluctuations. Among the changes needed to improve the grid: real-time monitoring, which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted in April “is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered.”
It’s not just Spain facing blackouts. New York City will have a power deficiency equivalent to the energy needed to power between 410,000 and 650,000 homes next summer — and that number could double by 2050, the state’s grid operator warned this week in its latest five-year report. “The grid is at a significant inflection point,” Zach Smith, senior vice president of system and resource planning for NYISO, said in a statement to Gothamist. “Depending on future demand growth and generator retirements, the system may need several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation within the next 10 years.”
Sodium-ion batteries are all the rage, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported yesterday about the commercial breakthrough by the startup Alsym. But a major challenge facing sodium-ion batteries compared to lithium-ion rivals is the stability of the cathode material in air and water, which can degrade the battery’s performance and lifespan. A new study by researchers at Tokyo University of Science found that one ingredient can solve the problem: Calcium. By discovering the protective effects of calcium doping in the batteries, “this study could pave the way for the widespread adoption” of sodium-ion batteries.
Rob talks with the author and activist about his new book, We Survived the Night.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His first book, We Survived the Night, was released this week — it uses memoir, reporting, and literary anthology to tell the story of Native families across North America, including his own.
NoiseCat was previously an environmental and climate activist at groups including 350.org and Data for Progress. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks with Julian about Native American nations and politics, the complexity and reality of Native life in 2025, and the “trickster” as a recurring political archetype.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What were lessons that you took away from the writing of the book, or from the reporting of the book, that changed how you thought about climate or the environment in some way that maybe wasn’t the case when you were working on these issues full time?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: I would say that while I was working on climate issues, I was actually, myself, really changing a lot in terms of my thoughts on how politics worked and did not work. I think I came into my period of my life as a climate activist really believing in the power of direct action, and protest, and, you know, if you get enough people in the streets and you get enough politicians on your side, you eventually can change the laws. And I think that there is some truth to that view.
But I think being in DC for four years, being really involved in this movement, conversation — however you want to put that — around the Green New Deal, around eventually a Biden administration and how that would be shaped around how they might go about actually taking on climate change for the first time in U.S. history in a significant way, really transformed my understanding of how change happens. I got a greater appreciation, for example, for the importance of persuading people to your view, particularly elites in decision-making positions. And I also started to understand a little bit more of the true gamesmanship of politics — that there is a bit of tricks and trickery, and all kinds of other things that are going on in our political system that are really fundamental to how it all works.
And I bring that last piece up because while I was writing the book, I was also thinking really purposefully about my own people’s narrative traditions, and how they get at transformations and how they happen in the world. And it just so happens that probably the most significant oral historical tradition of my own people is a story called a coyote story, which is about a trickster figure who makes change in the world through cunning and subterfuge and tricks, and also who gets tricked himself a fair amount.
And I think that in that worldview, I actually found a lot of resonance with my own observations on how political change happened when I was in Washington, D.C., and so that insight did really deeply shape the book.
Mentioned:
We Survived the Night, by Julian Brave NoiseCat
How Deb Haaland Became the First Native American Cabinet Secretary
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.