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It was mostly theater — but that doesn’t make it meaningless.
Republicans in Washington do not have a great track record executing themed policy weeks. Consider the Trump administration’s original 2017 Infrastructure Week, which had the misfortune of coinciding with former FBI Director James Comey’s live testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Or take the Infrastructure Week scheduled a few months after that, which Trump famously derailed by blaming “both sides” for the white supremacist-initiated violence in Charlottesville. Or take the Infrastructure Week after that one, when — well, you get it.
Past attempts at holding an Energy Week haven’t fared much better, and unless you’re an incredibly close reader of procedural political news, it’s possible you missed that last week was an Energy Week, too. (What else could you possibly have been thinking about?)
On the surface, Energy Week 2024 didn’t offer much worth paying attention to, which could also explain the absence of headlines. The House used the occasion to vote on four energy-related bills that have no chance of surviving in the Democrat-controlled Senate: H.R. 1023 (passed 209-204), which would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund; H.R. 1121 (passed 229-188, with 15 Democratic “yeas”), which prevents the president from imposing a moratorium on fracking without the authorization of Congress; H.R. 6009 (passed 216-200), a Lauren Boebert-sponsored bill that would block the Interior’s update of oil and gas leasing regulations; and H.R.7023 (passed 213-205), which chips away at Clean Water Act rules. The House also passed two non-binding resolutions, one that “denounces the harmful, anti-American energy policies of the Biden administration” and another that condemns the carbon tax, which saw 10 vulnerable Democrats join Republicans voting in favor of it.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called these efforts “bogus and nasty,” so it seems pretty clear these bills are destined to die somewhere between the House and Senate chambers, and the left mostly laughed them off. California Democratic Representative Scott Peters slammed Energy Week as an “unserious messaging exercise.” The Environmental Defense Fund called the week a waste. Longtime Hill commentator Jamie Dupree treated the affair to an eye roll in his Substack, noting that three of the bills voted on last week — H.R. 1121, H.R. 1023, and H.R. 1141 — were already approved by the House as part of the Lower Energy Costs Act (H.R. 1) last spring.
House Republican Leader Steve Scalise seemed to acknowledge this overlap in a recent interview with E&E News, complaining that H.R. 1 has languished in the Senate “for about a year now” — though, as Dupree points out, the bill never actually got sent by the House to the upper chamber, a delay for which “I can’t get any Republicans on Capitol Hill to give me a straight answer,” Dupree wrote.
In other words, Energy Week appears to be a classic case of political theater. But that doesn’t mean it was all meaningless. It’s always worth asking who, exactly, is all the song and dance for?
It may not have been another unfortunate policy-week coincidence that Energy Week lined up perfectly with CERAWeek, the energy summit held in Houston, where the head of Saudi Aramco called the phase-out of oil and gas a “fantasy.” What was not included on the Energy Week slate is also revealing — for instance, Washington Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ hydropower permitting bill. Perhaps it was excluded because it would have represented an actual attempt at policy-making, which is not what Energy Week was all about?
Danielle Butcher Franz, the CEO of the American Conservation Coalition’s Action Fund, told me in an emailed statement that she thinks “Congressional Republicans were right to celebrate American energy and push for domestic energy production” last week. But she also expressed disappointment over the party missing a “critical opportunity to demonstrate that American energy is clean energy,” and called the dismissal of climate change by some of the Republican members “frustrating and unproductive.” Butcher Franz added, for example, that expanding nuclear energy, building more energy projects, and beating China could have been “conservative approaches” to lowering emissions that nevertheless were absent from the slate of energy bills.
Energy Week wasn’t entirely pointless as a policymaking exercise, though. Sure, it was largely a wink to donors, but it also marked a show of alignment on priorities at a time when Republicans’ ability to get things done could reasonably make fossil fuel interests nervous. That Energy Week’s bills also align with the goals of the Heritage Foundation-authored playbook for a Republican presidency is further reassurance that the party is pursuing policies aimed at reducing barriers to new leasing and drilling rather than repeating the chaos of the previous administration. It’s organized. It’s intentional. It’s setting the stage.
Of course, none of this will matter if Democrats and climate-moderate Republicans win elections this year. But if that doesn’t happen, well — we might end up looking back at Energy Week and wondering how we ever missed it.
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On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.
A conversation with Stephanie Loucas, chief development officer for Renewable Properties
This week I got the chance to speak with Stephanie Loucas of Renewable Properties, one of the fantastic subject matter experts who joined me this week for a panel on local renewables conflicts at Intersolar. After revealing herself to me as someone in the development space who clearly cares about community engagement, I asked if I could bring her on the record to chat about her approach to getting buy-in on projects. She’s not someone who often works in utility scale – all her projects are under 10 megawatts – but the conflicts she deals with are the same.
Here’s an edited version of our chat outside the conference as we overlooked the San Diego bay:
I guess to start, what’s the approach you’d like to see the renewables development sector adopt when it comes to community engagement?
I would like to see developers collaborate a little bit more so messaging is similar and we can have more engagement sooner. I don’t think that some of this is some sort of secret sauce. We could be a little bit more together.
Okay, but what’s your approach?
Our approach is early and often, listen empathetically and try to answer the questions clearly and try to build trust.”
If there is no secret sauce, what’s the best way to build trust?
I think the best way to build trust is to listen, to address the issues, to understand what the community is really asking. I think it’s easy for a person to sit behind a computer and write a long letter or email with 25 concerns but actually talking to the person, which is something that I think the younger people in the industry – more junior folks – aren’t as accustomed to talking to people. They’re more used to communicating in written form.
You’re able to suss out what’s actually important by talking to them. They’ll hit their one-to-five most important topics, as opposed to the 25 things they’ll write in their letter.
What does ‘early and often’ look like for you?
Early is… as soon as you talk to the authority with jurisdiction, talk to them about who in the community is actually important. Who should we be talking to? Do you think we’ll have opposition? Do you think we’ll have supporters? And it’s getting the planning department’s perspective. Then you start from there, to build who you’re going to be talking to and when.
Okay. So what’s often then? Do you have to be there every day? Is it about having an office in the community?
I think it depends on the comments you get and what’s going on specifically in the community. Sometimes you have to be in it for a while to really root out what’s going on. It might feel like you’re starting to talk for a year, a certain amount of time before you submit your permit, but you don’t get to the root cause of what’s really bugging people until you’ve had more conversations and they’re trusting you’ll show back up. Answer those questions.
Let’s say you provided a report from a third party consultant addressing “X” and then they bring up “Y.” Then you address “Y” and they bring up another thing. It’s about listening and responding. That’s how you build trust.
So I’m often told I tell too many negative stories of conflict in this newsletter. Do you have any examples in your work where you really feel like you got community buy-in?
To be honest, one of the best is a recent case study. It’s a project coming online in New York where we were in the community for a long time, a lot of public meetings and there was a ton of opposition. Part of the opposition was confusing our project size. There was a huge project – a several hundred megawatt project – going on too. They kept using the same opposition talking points. And we said, we’re not that. We heard the community and talked them through it. We wanted to make sure they were evaluating the project for the appropriate level of impact it was having.
We had opposition and we overcame it in that town. And then really flipping the mayor, having him come around. We did a ribbon cutting ceremony. We made sure we had the right number of local people benefiting from a community solar program – we ended up with a 20% number [of local subscribers].
Does having local use of power – using power from the solar project near their backyard – help with getting buy in?
Absolutely. I think so. The electrons aren’t just in their viewpoint getting on the grid and they’re never knowing where they’re going.
A leaked internal memo reveals why the environmental group adopted President Trump’s new name.
The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding, according to a leaked internal memo reviewed by Heatmap News.
For the last week, the Nature Conservancy has been pilloried by figures in the climate and environmentalist community for changing the name of its conservation program in the Gulf of Mexico region to being a “Gulf of America” restoration program, brandishing what President Donald Trump declared on his first day in office would be the new official U.S. term for the body of water. Trump’s new name has become a First Amendment firestorm as news organizations find themselves split on whether to adopt the term and the White House is punishing outlets — including the Associated Press — for continuing to use the Gulf of Mexico.
We can now exclusively reveal why the Nature Conservancy adopted this fresh Trump branding: They were allegedly pressured into it.
Jennifer Morris, CEO of the Nature Conservancy, sent an email to all staff at the organization this morning stating that the organization’s conservation program in the Gulf of Mexico was renamed to Gulf of America “after receiving clear directives from a federal agency.” “Please know that we did not make this decision lightly,” Morris wrote. Attached to the email was staff guidance claiming the nonprofit “received specific direction from NOAA that we must change all references to the new nomenclature in association with our NOAA funded work in the Gulf.”
“For example, all maps, reports, and other deliverables must use ‘Gulf of America,’ the memo stated. “We have at least $156 million in active federal grants in the region, including $45 million from NOAA alone.’ Federal funding makes up most of the organization’s work in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the memo.
In addition, the Nature Conservancy has “been advised that new proposals in the Gulf for US federal grants must conform” to Trump’s executive order adopting “Gulf of America” as the official U.S. name for that body of water, the memo stated. State governors in the Gulf region in charge of “disseminating” remaining BP oil spill recovery funds have “followed suit in support of these nomenclature changes” and there is fear a “failure to adjust” could also “jeopardize” state funding.
“Ultimately, this decision was made after reviewing all the facts and looking at what the organization felt was best to ensure we can continue our conservation programs and support our teams on the ground,” the memo stated.
Historically, NOAA has been more insulated than other agencies from political pressures like this, which has helped it maintain a global reputation as a world-class scientific meteorological body.
This ordeal, however, echoes the one other time Trump seemed to put his thumb on NOAA’s scales — an incident best known as Sharpiegate. In 2019 Trump incorrectly proclaimed Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama. He went so far as to draw on a giant map with a Sharpie in the White House to show his guestimated pathway for the storm. After the NOAA office in Alabama publicly sought to reassure residents that, no, a hurricane wasn’t on the way, Trump officials pressured NOAA into backing the president, leading to the agency issuing an unsigned statement backing the claim. An inspector general report – which Trump officials reportedly sought to obstruct from seeing the light of day – ultimately found the NOAA statement violated its scientific integrity policy.
If the Gulf of America is the beginning of NOAA subservience, I’m nervous to see what happens when Trump’s version of the agency – which any day now is expected to undergo mass layoffs – pivots to climate change and renewable energy.
The Nature Conservancy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “We can find no evidence of that, so far,” NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said.