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Some climate policies are safe. Some are not.
Absent a last-minute deal between a bipartisan group of senators and the Republican-led House, the federal government will shut down on Sunday. With much of the Biden administration’s climate agenda a work in progress, a shutdown could grind time-sensitive rulemakings and grantmaking activities to a halt, not to mention regular environmental protection.
But it’s not so simple. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, much of the government’s climate work has been funded outside of the annual appropriations process and could prove fairly resilient to a shutdown. However, few agencies have released their contingency plans, and so it’s hard to parse exactly which activities will continue. The White House has been eager to use the prospect of government responsibilities going unfulfilled as leverage against Republican leaders in the House.
When we reached out to federal agencies and the White House for more information, they either declined to comment or referred us to the Office of Management and Budget. That office did not answer questions but a spokesperson said in an email that “shutdowns are disruptive and distracting, making it difficult for agencies to deliver for the American people at the same pace — even for programs with available funding — given how much time and attention must go to managing the impacts of a shutdown.”
The clock is ticking on several key upcoming climate and clean energy rules, due to the Congressional Review Act. The law allows Congress to overturn new federal rules within 60 legislative days — which can actually stretch months — by a simple majority vote, and with the president’s signature. That means if the rules aren’t finalized in time and Biden loses his re-election bid, some of the headway his agencies make to cut emissions could quickly be erased.
We talked to former staffers and lobbyists to get a handle on how a shutdown would affect climate and environmental programs throughout the federal government.
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Yes, the IRS has an important role to play here. Much of the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation is actually up to the IRS writing rules outlining how companies can qualify for tax credits. For example, the agency has yet to even propose rules to claim the lucrative tax credits for producing clean hydrogen, or finalize others on electric vehicle battery and mineral sourcing requirements, or apprenticeship requirements, or how tax-exempt entities can qualify for funding.
It’s not clear whether the IRS would continue to chip away at these processes if there’s a shutdown. When one loomed last year, the agency’s contingency plan said that its more than 80,000 employees would still be able to work thanks to “supplemental appropriations available through September 30, 2031.” But whether that will be the case this year remains unclear.
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents IRS workers, told its members that the IRS would “partially close” should a funding deal not be reached by September 30, according to the Federal News Network. The NTEU did not respond to a request for comment. A Treasury spokesperson also declined to comment and said that contingency plans would be released later this week.
Even if the IRS continues working on the rules, it will likely not be able to engage directly with industry or outside groups while the government remains closed, a former Department of Energy official, who asked not to be named, told us. “There’s still a lot of guidance that we’re waiting for, it’s critically important that it continues to move forward,” the former official said. “Activities that are people driven — negotiating, educating, and guidance — those are going to be much more impacted.”
There also wouldn’t be any of the announcements and public and private engagement that takes up much of the rulewriting process, the former official said.
And even if the IRS continues to work at something like its full potential, any work it has to do with other agencies whose funding runs out could be impacted, a lobbyist who works on energy issues pointed out to us. “Carryover funds may mean a short shutdown isn't a big deal, but a prolonged one could compound what is already a huge strain on agency resources and bandwidth,” the lobbyist said.
The EPA is in the middle of several rulemakings that are essential to U.S. climate progress, including regulations on cars and trucks, as well as power plants, and the experts we spoke with did not think a government shutdown would put the rules at risk. Stan Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy director, told us he noticed the agency had denied petitions from stakeholders to extend the comment period for the car emissions proposal, which tells him staffers are trying to get the rules out the door to safeguard them from a future administration.
“I think both of those standards, while they may be delayed a couple of weeks from their original time tables, will still meet the deadlines the agency has in mind for them,” he told us.
The EPA is also the lead administrator for about $41 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, including billions in clean energy grants. That’s not expected to be affected by a shutdown, since the IRA included some budget for staffing. However, the agency’s regular grant work, including funding distributed to states to conduct their environmental protection work, will come to a screeching halt, said Nicole Cantello, a lawyer at the agency who spoke with us in her capacity as president of the government employees union local in Chicago.
Cancello said that overall, the agency would be “profoundly affected” by a shutdown with 93% of its staff expected to be furloughed. A lot of the country’s air and water quality monitoring occurs at the state and local level, but some environmental enforcement capacity will certainly be lost, she told us. During the last government shutdown, she was in the middle of an enforcement case where the agency was collecting air quality data at the fenceline of a polluting facility that was directly next to a neighborhood. All of the data was coming into employees’ inboxes, she said, “and they couldn’t look to see whether or not that data showed that these people were endangering that community or not. I remember how frustrating that felt.”
Meiburg, who was with the agency through several shutdowns, told us they have disrupted time-sensitive research projects and caused supply chain breakdowns. The EPA inspects all pesticides that are imported into the country, and during past shutdowns the pesticides began piling up in warehouses, he said.
But Meiburg said there’s typically a small number of people who will still be on call in case of an environmental disaster, like the Maui wildfires or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine.
The Department of Energy plays a major role in climate policy, including overseeing the Loan Programs Office and making grants and funding demonstration projects for early stage energy technology like long duration batteries, advanced geothermal, and direct air capture. Many of those activities would likely continue.
According to the agency’s publicly available “lapse plan,” about 5,500 of its around 14,000 full-time employees would stay on in case of a shutdown. The multi-year appropriations provided by IRA and the infrastructure law would keep just over 1,000 of those employees on the job, according to the document: “As of August 4, 2023, 1,040 DOE employees were fully or partially funded by multi-year appropriations; these employees would continue to perform funded work after the exhaustion of DOE base funding.” Around 3,000 employees of the Bonneville Power Administration, the public power company in the Pacific Northwest, would continue working because it funds itself through power sales.
In the case of a shutdown lasting less than about a week, “It is anticipated that there would be no disruption to DOE operations during a short lapse in appropriations,” a guide to the shutdown published on the DOE website says. “DOE has historically had sufficient previously appropriated funds that remain available to support operations during a short term lapse.”
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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images