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Romany Webb, the deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, has some answers.
Here’s the state of play: The Trump administration has continued to withhold already-obligated funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure law from state and local governments, nonprofits, companies, and other entities.
More than a dozen groups have filed lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s suppression of congressionally appropriated funds that don’t align with his political agenda, and several district courts have responded by placing restraining orders on the pause. And yet Trump and his cabinet have mostly ignored these orders, keeping many awardees in limbo.
This funding freeze, as it has come to be known, is far-reaching, affecting farmers, universities, health research, and international aid. But even just within our little climate corner of the universe, its effects are sweeping and could majorly undercut efforts to reduce emissions. Weatherization assistance programs, electrical vehicle charging funds, grants for innovative climate technologies and cleantech manufacturing facilities, and so much more, are under threat.
What happens now? Especially in light of the Trump administration’s defiance of court orders to get the money flowing again, I wanted to better understand how all of this could possibly play out. So I brought my questions to Romany Webb, the deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. Here’s what I learned.
The most significant differences are the parties that filed them and the parties they were brought against, Webb told me. For example, there are two cases that name the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB. One was brought by a group of states, the other by a group of nonprofits. Both seek an injunction on the funding freeze, and in both cases, the judge has issued a temporary restraining order. But in the state case, the restraining order is worded in a way that it could be interpreted to only apply to the states named in the case, said Webb. “So basically, it would only require unfreezing of funds that were due to those states. Whereas the order that was issued in the other case was broader.”
The big question is whether the president has the authority to hold back, a.k.a. impound funds that have been appropriated by Congress, said Webb. A law called the Impoundment Control Act, passed in 1974, says the president must first make a public request to Congress to rescind specific funds; they can pause spending for 45 days while waiting for a response, but not longer.
There’s no evidence, in this case, that President Trump sent such a request. And while the freeze on foreign aid is supposed to last 90 days, there was no time period specified for the general pause and review of climate-related funds. But Trump has called the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional. “It does seem to me that these early actions freezing federal funding are really setting up that big question for the Supreme Court to hear and decide.”
One of the bases on which plaintiffs are challenging the Trump administration in these cases is the violation of the Impoundment Control Act. “In response to that argument, the administration might argue to the court, well, actually the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, so we were never required to comply with that act,” Webb told me. The lower courts will rule on that argument, parties will appeal, and eventually it will make its way to the highest court. If the Impoundment Control Act is on the table, that’s the sort of issue the Supreme Court will want to weigh in on.
Somewhere along the way, the various cases will likely be consolidated, Webb said, or one of the lower courts may pause its review until one of the other cases is decided. I asked how long she thought this would take to get to the Supreme Court, but she declined to speculate.
“These cases have been heard on a relatively expedited schedule. We’ve seen these initial actions being taken relatively quickly by the courts, like the temporary restraining order and so forth, but it’s really hard to predict how long that will all take to play out.”
Webb posited that private companies are in a difficult position. The Trump administration has said it is reviewing contracts to identify projects that are inconsistent with the president’s policy priorities. Some private companies may be hoping they’ll make it out the other end of that process. “My sense is that at least some of the private sector entities in this space are just waiting to see what will happen next,” she said.
It’s unclear. Webb said that if the freeze were legitimately lifted then that would “moot the case.” If specific grants or programs get canceled, new suits will have to be filed. But because the freeze is so broad, it may be difficult to determine whether it has or has not been lifted. Webb suggested that the courts might also allow states to amend their complaints to be more targeted.
Webb said it was "extremely concerning.” The three branches of the U.S. government, with their checks and balances, are designed to protect against these situations. “It depends, though, on whether the various branches will really step up and fulfill their functions and provide a true check on the executive,” said Webb.
In a recent opinion article for TheNew York Times, two constitutional law professors from New York University described the various powers that courts have to respond. If the Trump administration continues to flout the court, they wrote, “the courts would be likely to issue further orders, with increasingly strict and specific requirements such as a due date.” If the administration still doesn’t comply, the government’s lawyers could face disbarment. The court could issue fines, hold officials in contempt of court, or to really escalate things, it could hold them in criminal contempt, which would move the matter to the U.S. attorney to prosecute. Alternatively the court could jail officials found to be defying the court’s order.
That said, Trump has the power to pardon criminals and to order the U.S. Marshals Service not to make the court-ordered arrests, so these avenues may be roads to nowhere. The path the scholars end on is perhaps the darkest timeline but also the most reassuring one:
“The chaos precipitated by so radically destabilizing the judiciary and the rule of law might well have serious economic consequences, including in the stock markets,” they write. “Foreign investment would likely flee the country; the dollar would fall. This would bring added pressure on the White House to comply with the courts and on Congress to demand such compliance.”
Yes and no. Webb said it’s still early, and it’s unclear whether the funding freeze has resulted in the breach of any of the government’s contracts yet. They all have slightly different terms, but the payments are usually set up to be disbursed in tranches. If the freeze does delay payments beyond their contractual timelines, the existing court cases challenging the funding freeze may raise that argument. But the administration is also looking for contracts to cancel. All of these contracts have termination terms, and can’t just be cancelled for no reason, so we may see new cases around unlawful terminations. “I think we will see a lot of attempts to argue that federal awardees are not in compliance with their contracts,” Webb told me.
She also noted that under the first Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services tried to cancel some awards that were made under a Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program on the basis that it did not align with the president’s priorities and the courts rejected that argument. “Assuming the courts continue to hold that view, the Trump administration couldn’t just say, we’re going to terminate your grant for work on solar energy, because we hate solar energy.”
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Even as Iran retaliated against U.S. airstrikes, prices have stayed calm.
Oil prices have stayed stable so far following the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend, and President Donald Trump wants to keep it that way.
In two consecutive posts on Truth Social Monday morning, the president wrote “To The Department of Energy: DRILL, BABY, DRILL!!! And I mean NOW!!!” and “EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT!”
While Iran, of course, does not yet have an actual nuclear weapon, it does have a kind of “nuclear option” to retaliate: closing off the Strait of Hormuz, which separates the oil-rich countries like Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq (and Iran’s own largest ports) from the Indian Ocean, and by extension all of global shipping. Iran’s parliament approved closing off the strait, but any real effort to do so would have to come from Iran’s most senior leadership, which has not so far seemed inclined to torpedo its own economy.
Markets, at least so far, do not see much more risk today than they did before the U.S. airstrikes. West Texas Intermediate oil price benchmark sat at just over $74 a barrel Monday morning, up substantially from its low of just over $57 in early May, but up only mildly from its $68 a barrel level on June 12, the day before Israel began bombing Iran. Prices are basically flat since Friday, even after Iran said it had launched a strike on an American base in Qatar.
“Multiple oil tankers crossing the Strait of Hormuz this morning, both in and outbound,” Bloomberg’s Javier Blas wrote on X Monday morning. “No[t] even a hint of disruption. Oil loading across multiple ports in the Persian Gulf appears normal. If anything, export rates over the last week are higher than earlier in June.”
As Greg Brew, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, told me, “The Hormuz risk is generally overstated. The Iranian threats are mostly rhetoric and meant for domestic political consumption. Hardliners in particular will use threats to close the strait as a means of letting off steam following the U.S. bombing of Fordow.”
“In reality,” he went on, “Iran faces a massive disparity in forces in the Gulf. A move to close Hormuz would be near suicidal as it would expand the scope of the war, drag in the Gulf states as well as the U.S., and imperil Iran’'s own energy exports at a time when the regime will need every financial and economic lifeline it can get.”
Inasmuch as oil prices have moved in the past few weeks, it’s been in response to the perceived increased risk of some kind of cataclysm to the world oil trade — even if the actual chances of the strait being entirely closed to tanker traffic remains low.
“Prices remain elevated on account of the regional risk, and are likely to remain in the $70s or low $80s until we see a pathway toward broader de-escalation,” Brew said.
For the American oil industry, however, a more nervous market might be a more profitable one.
Aniket Shah, an analyst at Jefferies, wrote a note to clients over the weekend attributing the increase since May to “rising tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, which channels ~20% of global oil shipments.”
“While the US imports less Middle Eastern oil than in past decades, global price shocks still drive up domestic fuel and transport costs,” he wrote.
In the months running up to the recent oil price increase, American drillers were facing an unpleasant combination of tariffs, increased production overseas (encouraged by Trump), and low prices at home, which wrecked their capital planning. Some domestic oil and gas drillers like Matador in April and Diamondback in May told their investors they planned to decrease their planned capital expenditures; over the past two months, drillers have been slowly but steadily taking rigs offline, according to the widely watched Baker Hughes rig count.
Conflict in the Middle East could therefore provide some relief (at least for the oil and gas industry) at home. “U.S. producers are among the winners here,” Brew told me. “A few months of higher prices will offer a nice hedge for shale drillers and ease their plans to reduce expenditure and output for the year.”
But higher profits for oil drillers will not necessarily translate into increased production, as Trump has commanded. “Since this is all based on risk premium and does not reflect a change in fundamentals, shale drillers are likely to deliver the gains to shareholders rather than pumping the money back into production,” Brew explained. “An overall drop in U.S. onshore output in 2025 is probably still in the cards.”
In that scenario, oil company profits would rise while production would fall year-over-year. And that would likely mean an even more infuriated Trump, who has also recently reignited his campaign to push Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates, citing several months of low inflation.
“Elevated oil prices risk stalling recent disinflation trends and complicates the Fed’s path to rate cuts,” Shah wrote.
Even if the strait remains open, if oil prices don’t fall, expect more Truths.
On record-breaking temperatures, oil prices, and Tesla Robotaxis
Current conditions: Wildfires are raging on the Greek island of Chios • Forecasters are monitoring a low-pressure system in the Atlantic that could become a tropical storm sometime today • Residents in eastern North Dakota are cleaning up after tornadoes ripped through the area over the weekend, killing at least three people.
A dangerous heat wave moves from the Midwest toward the East Coast this week, and is expected to challenge long-standing heat records. In many places, temperatures could hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit and feel even warmer when humidity is factored in. “High overnight temperatures will create a lack of overnight cooling, significantly increasing the danger,” according to the National Weather Service. Extreme heat warnings and advisories are in effect from Maine through the Carolinas, across the Ohio Valley and down into southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana. “It’s basically everywhere east of the Rockies,” National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Gehring told The Associated Press. “That is unusual, to have this massive area of high dew points and heat.”
AccuWeather
Regional grid operator PJM Interconnection, which covers 13 states, issued an energy emergency alert for today. The alert urges power transmission and generation owners to delay any planned maintenance so that no grid sources are out of commission as temperatures soar. A heat wave of this nature is rare this early in the summer. The last time temperatures hit 100 degrees in June in New York City, for example, was in 1995, according to AccuWeather. Heat waves are becoming more frequent and more intense as the climate warms. Here’s a look at how these events have changed over the past 60 years or so:
Oil markets are jittery this morning after Iran’s parliament endorsed a measure to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. About 20% of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas shipments travel through the shipping route, and as The Wall Street Journalexplains, the supplies “dictate prices paid by U.S. drivers and air travelers.” Oil prices rose to five-month highs this morning on the news. Tehran has long threatened to close the strait, but such a move is seen as unlikely because it would disrupt Iran’s own energy exports, which are its “sole global energy revenue stream,” one analyst told the Journal.
A handful of climate-related provisions in the GOP’s reconciliation bill are in limbo after the Senate parliamentarian advised that the policies violated the “Byrd Rule,” i.e. were deemed extraneous to budgetary matters, and thus were subject to a 60-vote threshold instead of the simple majority allowed for reconciliation. The provisions include:
The Senate Finance Committee is set to meet with the parliamentarian today.
In case you missed it: The Supreme Court on Friday gave the green light for fuel producers to challenge a Clean Air Act waiver issued by the EPA that lets California set tougher vehicle emissions standards than those at the federal level. A lower court rejected the lawsuit from Diamond Alternative Energy and other challengers last year, but as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, California’s ambitious Zero-Emission Vehicle Program is hurting fuel producers, so they have standing to sue. The vote was 7 to 2, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has explained, if the EPA waiver is eliminated, Tesla could take a big financial hit. That’s because the zero-emissions vehicle program lets automakers earn credits based on the number and type of ZEVs they produce, and since Tesla is a pure-play EV company, it has always generated more credits than it needs. “The sale of all regulatory credits combined earned the company a total of $595 million in the first quarter [of 2025] on a net income of just $409 million,” Brigham reported. “That is, they represented its entire margin of profitability. On the whole, credits represented 38% of Tesla’s net income last year.”
Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, over the weekend. A small number of rides were doled out to hand-picked influencers and retail investors, and a Tesla employee sat in the front passenger seat of each autonomous Model Y to monitor safety. The rollout was “uncharacteristically low-key,” Bloombergreported, but CEO Elon Musk said the company is being “super paranoid about safety.” San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Antonio are rumored to be the next cities slated for Robotaxi service. “Tesla is still behind Waymo, by several years,” wrote Jameson Dow at Electrek. “But Waymo has also not been scaling particularly quickly, and certainly both are slower than a lot of techno-optimists would have liked. So we’ll have to see which tortoise wins this race.” The stakes are pretty high: Investment management firm ARK Invest projected that Robotaxis could bring in $951 billion for Tesla by 2029 and make up 90% of the company’s earnings.
A new report from energy think tank Ember concludes that in the world’s sunniest cities, it’s now possible (and economically viable) to get at least 90% of the way to constant solar electricity output for every hour of the day, 365 days a year.
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.