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Thanks to the Supreme Court, it is a very difficult proposal to talk about.
The Environmental Protection Agency just shoved power plants towards the renewable energy transition. But don’t expect supporters to crow about it.
On Thursday, the EPA took the long-awaited step of proposing greenhouse gas limits for new and existing power plants. If finalized and implemented, the rules would vastly reduce carbon pollution from the power sector by 2040 and mark the first time ever that the nation’s electricity system is subject to federal climate restrictions.
But first the rules must survive the sharply conservative Supreme Court, which has blocked previous attempts at regulating power-plant pollution. And so environmentalists and Biden officials will be forced to walk a rhetorical and legal tightrope: In order to keep the all-important rules alive, they will have to describe them as not very significant at all. And even though the rules will likely increase renewables’ share of U.S. power generation, few green groups will brag about it.
Why? Because they are dancing around a major Supreme Court ruling, West Virginia v. EPA, that came out last year.
In the case, the Court struck down the Clean Power Plan, President Barack Obama’s 2015 attempt at regulating climate pollution from power plants. Obama’s plan treated each state’s power plants as a single system, then let each state choose how to cut carbon pollution from that system. States could shut down plants or create a carbon-trading scheme. They could even link multiple carbon markets together to establish a de facto national cap-and-trade market.
That went too far beyond the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act, the Court ruled. Although the Court said that the agency could, in theory, issue rules to cut greenhouse gases from the electricity sector, those rules had to keep “within the fenceline” of each power plant.
The EPA could no longer get fancy when it wanted to regulate climate pollution. It could only use blunter, command-and-control technological mandates to reduce carbon pollution from each type of power plant, the Court said. And any technologies that it required had to be both “cost-reasonable” and “adequately demonstrated,” that is, affordable and feasible to install at scale.
The EPA’s new proposal tries to hew within those guidelines. The agency has determined that the best available technology to reduce emissions directly from fossil-fuel-burning power plants is to install carbon-capture equipment. Carbon-capture-and-storage technology, or CCS, is now affordable and feasible, the agency asserts.
“There’s a 100% chance that this will be challenged in court,” Michael Gerrard, a Columbia Law professor and the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told us. “The debate will largely be about if CCS is ‘adequately demonstrated.’”
At stake, too, is the question of whether the rules represent a Trojan horse — that although the proposal appears to comply with the Court’s guidelines, the expense and hassle of installing carbon-capture equipment is meant to force utilities to shift to renewables anyway.
That could in fact be the rules’ practical effect. (Some environmentalists will admit — although not on the record — that they like the rules for this reason.) States and utilities can achieve the new standards any way they want, and in many cases they will find that shutting down a power plant and replacing it with wind, solar, and batteries is cheaper than installing new carbon scrubbers. Even with the Inflation Reduction Act’s new subsidies, carbon capture could prove to be more expensive or complicated than other options. CCS requires a network of pipelines and wells to inject carbon underground; wind, solar, and batteries mostly require open land.
Power plant regulations by the EPA could add 17 to 170 gigawatts of solar and wind to the grid by 2035, compared to the growth that is expected from the Inflation Reduction Act alone, according to Ben King, an analyst at the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm.
At the absolute high end, renewables would command 5% more market share in the United States than they would otherwise, he said. (These estimates were based on an analysis of a similar, though not identical, version of the EPA’s proposal.)
Any legal challenges will leave the EPA’s lawyers in a difficult position. The agency must show that carbon capture is viable and not cost-prohibitive; and make it clear that the regulations are flexible for states and utilities, giving them a number of ways to meet the standard; and downplay the fact that in many cases the cheapest way to comply will in fact be to transition to renewables and batteries.
The industry, ever-desperate to evade regulations, has already begun to insinuate that carbon capture technology is not yet commercially available — a shift in tone from its typical enthusiasm for the technology — and therefore cannot be the basis for any standard. As we previously reported, Southern Company, a utility that has championed CCS, told EPA that the technology was “many years away” from becoming a reality.
“The irony here is that for many years, the industry talked about clean coal, and clean coal meant coal with CCS. And they were claiming that it worked, that it was available. And now they’ve switched. They say that now, years later, after a lot of technological development and billions of dollars of research, it’s not available,” Gerrard told us.
Supporters argue that the EPA’s new regulations are backed by precedent. The agency has long mandated that coal plants install technology that “scrubs” sulfur-dioxide emissions out of their exhaust streams, Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at the think tank Energy Innovation, told us.
As those rules have started to bite, some companies found that it was cheaper simply to shut coal plants down than install the scrubbers. Two years ago, a power company called Amaren determined it made more sense to shut down its Rush Island coal plant in Missouri 15 years earlier than planned rather than pay for upgrades to comply with the standard.
“Was it illegal for the EPA to build a standard that way? No, it’s perfectly reasonable,” Gimon said. “It’s like, ‘We put in a standard. We know you can comply with this standard at a cost. It's not astronomical, but if you think you can do better by retiring the unit and doing something else, knock yourself out.’ That's how it’s worked.”
Whether the EPA’s rules are upheld or not, the long-term future of the most carbon-intensive power plants on the grid — coal plants — is not in doubt.
“The grid is undergoing its own transformation of increasing renewables and decreasing fossil fuels,” Jay Duffy, litigation director at Clean Air Task Force, told us. In March, the Energy Information Administration projected that coal-fired generation would drop to about 50% of its current levels within eight years.
“No regulation,” he said, “is going to change that transition.”
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The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.
The new Nissan Leaf is joining a whole crop of new electric cars in the $30,000 range.
Here is an odd sentence to write in the year 2025: One of the most interesting electric vehicles on the horizon is the Nissan Leaf.
The Japanese automaker last week revealed new images and specs of the redesign it had teased a few months ago. The new Leaf, which will arrive in 2026, is a small crossover that’s sleeker than, say, a Tesla Model Y, but more spacious than the previous hatchback versions of the car. Nissan promises it will have a max range above 300 miles, while industry experts expect the company to target a starting price not too far above $30,000.
The updated Leaf won’t be one of those EVs that smokes a gas-powered sports car in a drag race, not with the 214 horsepower from that debut version and certainly not with the 174 horsepower from the cheaper version that will arrive later on. Its 150-kilowatt max charging speed lags far behind the blazing fast 350-kilowatt charging capability Hyundai is building into its Ioniq electric vehicles. But because it lacks some of these refinements, the new Nissan may arrive as one of the most compelling of the “affordable” EVs that are, finally, coming to drivers.
Not bad for a car that had become an electric afterthought.
The original Nissan Leaf was a revelation merely for its existence. Never mind that it was a lumpy potato derived from the uninspired Nissan Versa — here was the first mass-market electric car, heralding the age of the EV and welcomed with plenty of “car of the year” laurels at the dawn of the 2010s. Its luster would not last, however, as the arrival of the Tesla Model S a couple of years later stole the world’s attention. The second-generation Leaf that arrived in 2017 was an aesthetic and technological leap forward from its predecessor, with a range that topped 200 miles in its most advanced form. It was, for the time, a pretty good EV. Almost immediately, it was overshadowed by the introduction of Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y, which catapulted Elon Musk’s company into complete dominance of the global EV market.
It took nearly a decade for Nissan (which fell into corporate mismanagement and outright crisis in the meantime) to update the stale and outdated Leaf. As a result, you might think the new version of the OG EV will arrive just in time to be outshone again. Yet the peculiar nature of the evolving electric car market has created an opportunity for the Leaf to finally grow and thrive.
There was a time when the mythical affordable Tesla could have taken the brand into the entry-level car market, and perhaps below the magic starting price of $30,000. But that has turned out to be a distraction dangled in front of fanboys and investors. In reality, Musk effectively killed the idea as he instead rolled out the Cybertruck and pivoted the company toward the dream of total vehicle autonomy.
Thanks to Tesla’s refusal to act like a normal car company, the affordable EV market is still there for the taking. Some are already in the game: Hyundai’s little Kona Electric starts at $33,000, and I’ve lauded Chevrolet for building a base version of the Equinox EV that starts around $35,000. In the next year or so, an influx of EVs in the $30,000 to $35,000 range might really change the game for electric-curious buyers.
The new Leaf is suddenly a big part of that mix. No, it won’t compete on price with a comparable combustion Nissan like the Kicks crossover that starts in the low $20,000s (not without the $7,500 tax credit, which would have made the new crop of affordable EVs directly cost-competitive with entry-level gas cars). The Leaf is likely to start just above $30,000, with the price creeping higher for buyers who opt for better performance or more range (and as I’ve noted numerous times, you ought to buy all the range you can afford if an EV is going to be your main car).
Arriving next year to compete with the Leaf is the new Chevy Bolt, another revival of an early EV icon. Experts expect a similar price range there. The anticipated Kia EV3 should come to America eventually with a starting cost around $35,000. The Jeff Bezos-backed Slate electric truck shocked the world with its promise of a bare-bones EV in the $20,000s — but, by the time the average buyer adds enough amenities to make it liveable, most Slate trucks will probably top $30,000.
Elon Musk may have abdicated his role as the Leaf’s antagonist via his refusal to build an affordable car, but erstwhile ally Donald Trump is poised to assume the role. Since the Leaf is slated to be built in Japan, the EV would be subject to whatever tariffs might be in place by the time it goes on sale next year. A 25% tariff, plus the federal government’s flip to punishing EVs with penalties instead of rewarding them with incentives, would kill the car’s value proposition in the U.S. Perhaps, then, it will become the next great affordable EV — for everybody else.
On life-threatening temperatures, New York’s nuclear ambitions, and cancelled clean energy projects
Current conditions: Monsoon conditions are bringing flash floods to New Mexico • A heat warning has been issued in Beijing as temperatures creep toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit • It's hot and dry in Tehran today as a tenuous ceasefire between Iran and Israel comes into effect.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Monday that she wants to bring new, public nuclear power back to the state. She directed the New York Power Authority, the state power agency, to develop at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear capacity upstate. Hochul did not specify a design or even a location for the new plant, but based on a few clues in the press release and where Hochul chose to make the announcement, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin speculates that the project could be a small modular reactor, specifically GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300, one of a handful of SMR designs vying for both regulatory approval and commercial viability in the U.S. “Canada’s Ontario Power Generation recently approved a plan to build one,” Zeitlin notes, “with the idea to eventually build three more for a total 1.2 gigawatts of generating capacity, i.e. roughly the amount Hochul’s targeting.”
The announcement comes at a time when the federal regulatory and tax balance is tipping toward nuclear. The Trump administration issued a fleet of executive orders looking to speed up nuclear construction and regulatory approvals, and Senate Republicans’ version of the mega budget reconciliation bill includes far more generous treatment of nuclear development compared to wind and solar.
The heat dome that’s moving slowly across the U.S. is bringing dangerous conditions to millions of Americans. Multiple cities across the Midwest and East Coast felt hotter than 100 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, including Chicago, Nashville, and Raleigh. Roads buckled in Missouri. In New York’s Staten Island, the heat index hit 113 degrees. “This is life-threatening,” NYC Emergency Management said in a post on X. “At this level, the human body struggles to cool itself. Prolonged exposure or physical activity can quickly lead to heat stroke.” Power outages were reported in parts of the city. New York Mayor Eric Adams urged residents to help relieve the strain on the electric grid by avoiding using large appliances in the middle of the day, turning off lights, and limiting unnecessary air conditioning use. Wholesale energy prices soared as use skyrocketed. According to AccuWeather, more than 160 daily high temperature records could fall this week before things cool down Wednesday. Nearly 150 million people are affected by some kind of heat alert, and about 10% of the nation’s population will endure temperatures at or above 100 degrees today.
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About $1.4 billion in clean energy projects were cancelled last month as policy uncertainty mounts and the GOP’s budget reconciliation megabill hacks away at clean energy tax credits and permitting reform. According to a new report from clean energy business group E2, $15.5 billion in new factories and electricity projects have been nixed since the start of 2025, along with the 12,000 new jobs those projects were expected to create. “Republican congressional districts are losing the most,” the report finds. “More than $9 billion in investments and almost 10,000 jobs have been cancelled, delayed, or closed in Republican districts so far in 2025.”
The world added 741 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity last year, according to the new Renewables Global Status Report from Paris-based think tank REN21. That’s a new record, but it still falls far short of the COP28 goal to triple renewables capacity by 2030. In fact, “current trajectories suggest a shortfall of 6.2 terawatts – more than all renewables deployed to date,” the report finds. Here are some other key takeaways:
REN21
The Trump administration will roll back protections for nearly 60 million acres of pristine national forest, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced Monday. Rescinding the 2001 “Roadless Rule” will open vast swathes of the nation’s forests — including Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which is North America’s largest temperate rainforest — to industrial activities. The administration called the rule “overly restrictive,” and said rolling it back will allow for better fire prevention and “responsible” timber production. The logging industry applauded the announcement; conservation groups condemned it. The rollback is likely to be challenged in court.
“I now believe that cleaning up methane leaks from the production and shipping of oil and gas — one of the most significant sources of these emissions — is the best hope we have to avoid triggering some of the most consequential climate tipping points in the next decade. I think realistically it is our only hope.” –Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club, on his biggest regrets as an environmentalist.