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Oh, he’d never self-identify as an environmentalist. But not even climate activists have had the courage to propose a 10% tax on energy.
Dear Donald Trump,
I will be honest with you. I doubted at first. I didn’t understand the plan. But now that I see what you are doing, I have to say: I underestimated you. I was not really familiar with your game.
Yes, I finally see it all now. Even though you have attacked environmentalists for years, even though you have called climate change a “hoax” and a “scam,” and even though you have given climate deniers access to the highest echelons of your administration, I finally appreciate your peculiar genius.
You say that your big and beautiful tariffs are meant to bring about a new American golden age, but I know you’re hiding the truth. With your unprecedented tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports — and your levies on building materials of all sorts — you are doing what nobody else has had the courage to do.
You are trying to engineer the shock decarbonization of America — no matter the peril, no matter the cost.
Yes, it might seem crazy. But think about it. For years, whenever environmentalists have gathered in secret — and I’m talking the real radicals here, not the ones who send out mailers or go on TV — they plot about a vast agenda to remake America. They hate the fossil fuel industry, of course. But they go further than that. They loathe driving, so they want to destroy the auto industry. They hate big trucks, especially SUVs and pickups. They want to make gasoline more expensive. And really, if we’re being honest, they want to force everyone to live in cities.
I don’t go for such a radical agenda, myself. I’m much more of a moderate. But I have to admit: I know a secret radical environmentalist when I see one. And you, Mr. Trump — well, I won’t say it out loud. But as one former Democratic climate official texted me (and this is real), it might be time to start talking about a “GREEN NEW DONALD.”
Just think about it. Transportation is the most carbon-intensive sector of the U.S. economy, and big personal vehicles — SUVs and pickups — are responsible for the largest share of that pollution. Selling those big trucks to Americans is what drives Ford and General Motors’ profits, and those two companies have developed complex supply chains that can cross the U.S., Mexican, and Canadian borders half a dozen times before their vehicles’ final assembly. The biggest trucks — like the Chevy Silverado — have a particularly arcane value chain, spanning Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Japan.
Environmentalists have struggled to figure out how to deal with Americans’ affinity for these big cars. But you, Mr. Trump, you knew just what needed to be done. You slapped giant tariffs on cars and trucks and auto parts, which could spike new car prices by $4,000 to $10,000, according to Anderson Economic Group.
There’s even a good chance that price hike could hit internal combustion cars worse than it hits EVs — in part because the internal-combustion car supply chain has existed for longer and has had more time to ooze across North America. This widespread damage could prompt layoffs at Ford and GM — but you didn’t hesitate for the climate’s sake, comrade! You were ruthless.
But Mr. Trump, you didn’t stop there. As you surely know, roughly a third of America’s greenhouse gas emissions come from natural gas. It is the prize jewel of fossil fuels, and it’s absolutely core to the U.S. energy system — and Mr. Trump, you did not hesitate to tax it directly. Thanks to your new 10% tariff on Canadian energy imports, American consumers can now expect to pay an extra $1.1 billion a year for natural gas, according to the American Gas Association. Those higher costs will be concentrated in western states and New England.
Your tariffs are also going to make electricity prices go up, particularly in some of the swingiest congressional districts around the Great Lakes. Electricity will also get more expensive in Maine, which has a Senate race in 2026. Mr. Trump, this is an act of true political courage. Normally, environmentalists wouldn’t support raising electricity prices, because it might discourage people from buying EVs or electrifying their homes. But since you’re raising electricity and natural gas and oil prices at the same time, you’re practically begging Americans to buy heat pumps, induction stoves, and invest in energy efficiency technologies essential for decarbonization. And to do so even though it might put your own party’s control of the Senate at risk? You are one hell of an environmental zealot.
Even your steel and aluminum tariffs and your new levies on Canadian lumber are inspired by your climate fervor. By raising the cost of new construction, you are discouraging single-family home construction and all but forcing more Americans to live in multi-family buildings, which are more energy efficient and have lower emissions. Mr. Trump, you really think of everything! I never should have doubted. You are going to make us live in the pods! And with your steep agricultural tariffs, you might even make us eat the bugs!
The most impressive thing you’ve done, though, is your sly little attack on the American oil industry.
The American fossil fuel industry imports more than a million barrels of oil from western Canada every day. This sulfurous sludge is important to the U.S. refining industry because it complements the lighter oil that comes roaring out of American fracking wells. By combining America’s lighter oil with Canada’s heavy crude, U.S. refineries can cheaply churn out a range of high-value products, including gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
It’s really important that these American refineries have easy access to as much western Canadian oil as they need as its easy availability lets them ramp up and down different types of fuel production depending on what the market requires at the moment. That’s why they have invested tens of billions of dollars in equipment specially designed to process heavy, sulfur-rich Canadian oil.
In the past, Canadian companies have tried to expand these exports. As you remember, more than a decade ago, one Canadian company wanted to build a pipeline known as Keystone XL. But this came with downsides for the climate: Canadian crude is some of the most carbon-intensive oil in the world, and burning it in large quantities could have meant it was “game over for the climate,” according to journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben.
The goal of fighting the Keystone XL pipeline was to raise the cost of importing Canadian crude oil, hopefully keeping it in the ground, while undercutting U.S. refinery profit margins. Activists won that fight — and they had your help, Mr. Trump. After the Biden administration revoked Keystone XL’s construction permit in 2021, its developer sued the U.S. government in international trade court and lost. Ironically, it may have had a better shot at winning its case under NAFTA than under its Trump-negotiated replacement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
But of course, even that didn’t unwind America’s and Canada’s decades of economic integration. The United States still imports hundreds of millions of barrels of Canadian oil a year, and all that oil damages the climate while simultaneously keeping U.S. gasoline prices low.
But Mr. Trump — you are now attacking this too! You astound me. You have bashed those Canadian oil imports with a 10% energy tax. This will prove even more effective at hurting the North American fossil fuel industry and raising American gasoline prices than blocking the Keystock XL pipeline did, because it will knock refineries right in their profit margins. If you play your cards right, you might even raise the cost of diesel and jet fuel too!
Now, Mr. Trump: I realize you can’t come out and say all this. In fact, you claimed last week that you wanted to revive Keystone XL, even though its developer has given up on it.
This struck many people as silly, but I know just what you are doing here. With your words, you are trying to look like a fossil-fuel-friendly Republican to please your base. But with your actions, you are actually raising taxes on the U.S. fossil fuel industry. What other explanation is there? Surely nobody would be so silly as to propose making it cheaper to import Canadian crude oil at the same time that they deliberately make it more expensive. And surely nobody would say they support autoworkers while actually destroying the U.S. auto industry. That would be truly self-defeating — and Mr. Trump, you are a winner!
Some people — well, really, just your Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — have implied that you might lift these tariffs as soon as tomorrow. I don’t believe them. I know what you’re up to here. You are not going to fold so soon. You are trying to keep talking the talk even as you whack away at cars, oil, and gas. I might even say that you are like a moldy strawberry: “Republican red” on the outside but “deep green” on the inside.
Now, you could go even further. Conservatives have long observed, however sarcastically, that since carbon emissions correlate with GDP in so many countries (although not in the U.S.), the fastest way to fight climate change is to engineer a giant recession. Some might assume this would be going too far for you — it would be going much too far for me. But on Tuesday, the International Chamber of Commerce warned that your tariffs could set off spiraling trade wars, putting the country in “1930s trade-war territory” and triggering a new Great Depression. Just think of how the emissions will fall from that!
Oh, Mr. Trump! You really ARE a Green New Donald. You truly are willing to sacrifice anything for the climate — even if it means kneecapping the American economy, bamboozling the world, and even ending industrial civilization to do it! Oh, Mr. Trump, I am overcome. You astound, captivate, and enthrall me. Now I understand how JD Vance feels.
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That’s okay for clean energy firms, terrible for manufacturers, and a big risk for everyone.
Over the past few months, you could put together three different — and somewhat conflicting — pictures of the American economy.
For companies exposed to the AI boom, business has been good — excellent, even. The surge in ongoing capital investment into data centers and electricity has been larger than other recent booms, such as the telecom buildout. Electricity demand is soaring, especially in Texas and the Mid-Atlantic. Technology companies have signed power offtake deals with nuclear and hydroelectricity companies. If anything, companies exposed to artificial intelligence are more afflicted by congested supply chains and shortages than by slack demand — see the yearslong waiting lists to get a new transformer or natural gas turbine.
Outside of the AI economy, though, the economy has been a fair bit colder. You might even say it’s been frozen by indecision. When you talk to business leaders, they confess confusion about where things are heading. President Trump’s constantly changing tariffs — and his administration’s mercurial policy shifts — have made it difficult for non-AI-exposed businesses to plan long-term capital investment.
You could hear this view from clean energy manufacturing and traditional fossil firms alike. When I talked to John Henry Harris, the CEO of the medium-duty truck maker Harbinger Motors, for an episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast in June, he told me that his company was just about to shift a production process to Mexico when a last-minute Trump change made it cheaper to keep it in China. Meanwhile, an oil and gas executive recently told the Dallas Federal Reserve: “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”
But the data contradicted that tepid view. This was the third picture that we were getting of the economy. Through the summer, federal surveys showed an economy that was performing okay. In May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 139,000 jobs; it gained another 147,000 jobs, apparently, in June. The AI boom was clearly contributing to those robust reports. But how could an economy that business leaders otherwise described as difficult be going so well?
Now we can finally square these disparate pictures.
On Friday, the federal government released its newest tranche of job numbers. The headline number was mediocre — the U.S. added a mere 73,000 jobs in July — but the guts of the report were worse. The government revised down its estimate of the May and June reports by a total of 258,000 jobs. With these new numbers in hand, it’s clear that the labor market has essentially stalled out since Liberation Day in April.
The unemployment rate slightly rose to 4.2%, which was in line with what economists predicted.
These new reports clarify that the broader American economy wasn’t actually thriving. Its summer strength was a mirage the whole time. Outside of AI, things are downright frigid. And as President Trump continues to shuffle tariffs and increase trade uncertainty, we can expect conditions to worsen. Trump seems hellbent even on clouding our ability to understand the underlying economy: on Friday afternoon, he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, a career civil servant.
If you squint, you can see a hazy “AI sector” versus “non-AI sector” distinction in the data, even among the energy and decarbonization companies we cover at Heatmap. But it’s not obvious. Contrary to what you might expect when power demand is surging, utility employment was basically flat last month. Heavy and civil engineering construction jobs were up by 6,000, and “nonresidential specialty trade contractors” — a category that can include electricians — gained nearly 2,000 jobs.
But manufacturing lost 11,000 jobs last month, with the motor vehicles industry driving 2,600 of those losses. Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas jobs were down. The Institute of Supply Management report, a private survey of U.S. manufacturing activity, showed the sector shrank in July for the fifth month in a row.
And even though the Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred buyout program for more than 150,000 people has yet to hit, the federal government bled 12,000 jobs.
In a way, the clean energy industry — or at least solar, battery, nuclear, and geothermal developers — might consider themselves lucky. Despite the best efforts of Trump’s officials, and despite the chaos of President Trump’s policies, they have been able to eke through the past few months because of the AI boom. Nearly 70% of all new power-generating capacity added to the U.S. grid in the first quarter of this year came from solar panels, and the government has thrown its weight behind next-generation nuclear and geothermal technologies. A tepid jobs report might even bring some interest rate relief from the Federal Reserve.
But if that AI boom slows down, we should all watch out below.
A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.
The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.
The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.