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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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Rob and Jesse pick apart Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion with University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley.
Did the Supreme Court just make it easier to build things in this country — or did it give a once-in-a-lifetime gift to the fossil fuel industry? Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 against environmentalists who sought to use a key permitting law, the National Environmental Policy Act, to slow down a railroad in a remote but oil-rich part of Utah. Even the court’s liberals ruled against the green groups.
But the court’s conservative majority issued a much stronger and more expansive ruling, urging lower courts to stop interpreting the law as they have for years. That decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, may signal a new era for what has been called the “Magna Carta” of environmental law.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor and frequent writer on permitting issues. He is also Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s former chief legal counsel. Rob, Jesse, and Nick discuss what NEPA is, how it has helped (and perhaps hindered) the environment, and why it’s likely to change again in the near future. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It seems like what the court is doing here is not only basically using this to make a statement, it’s announcing a new jurisprudence on NEPA. We want you to start treating this law really, really differently than you’ve been treating it in the past. And like, we are going to come down into your room and force you to clean up this mess whenever we want to now because of how important we think this is.
Do you think that’s too strong a statement? It seems this is not only declaring what the court’s view on NEPA is, but almost declaring a new plan of action.
Nicholas Bagley: Like many Supreme Court decisions, I think it’s amenable to two competing interpretations. One is exactly as you say: It’s a new era of NEPA jurisprudence, and the basic rule of a NEPA case is now going to be that environmental groups lose. And so I think there’s no way to read the decision except as a walloping loss to environmental groups, at least as a matter of tone and, I think, intention by the Supreme Court.
But there is a narrower reading available, and one that suggests that maybe this decision won’t have as big an effect as maybe the Supreme Court justices want it to. And the reason for that is they didn’t close the door altogether on the judicial evaluation of the reasonableness of its actions. And when a court goes in and says, Hmm, has an agency acted arbitrarily? Again, that’s a multifaceted inquiry. It’s going to involve a lot of different factors. And the court says be deferential, but that’s actually always been the rule.
They use a lot of strident language here, but that strident language is not going to make a lick of difference if you get in front of a highly motivated judge who happens to dislike the project in question in a district court in New Mexico. And that happens. So if you’re an agency and you’re thinking to yourself, Can I cut back on the amount of environmental studies that I do? Can I not investigate these dopey alternatives? You might think to yourself, you know, I have like a 20% or a 30% chance, my odds are a little better than they were before — maybe even a lot better than they were before — at winning if this case is litigated. But they’re also not 100%. So maybe what I ought to do is keep doing what I’ve been doing just to be safe. And I think that’s at least a possibility. We don’t know how it’s going to play out on the ground.
The last thing I’ll say about this is, you said that the Supreme Court is going to act like your mom who’s going to come and tell you to clean up your room.
Meyer: Yeah, exactly. Yes.
Bagley: The trouble is it takes something like, what, 50 cases a year? There are hundreds of these cases brought, and there’s only so much the Supreme Court can do, and in closer cases I think it might just be inclined to let matters lie.
So, you know, I think it is reasonable to think that this is the Supreme Court’s effort to usher in a new era of unique NEPA jurisprudence. It is reasonable to think it is going to have some effects on agency behavior and some effects on lower court behavior. But it may not pretend the revolution that it looks like on its face.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
On Alaskan oil, CCS, and ‘zombie plants’
Current conditions: Flights have resumed to and from Sicily after Mt. Etna’s most powerful eruption in four years on Monday • There have already been almost half as many wildfire ignitions in the U.S. in 2025 as there were in all of 2024 • More than 700 people are feared dead in central Nigeria after heavy rains and flash floods.
USGS
The Department of the Interior announced Monday that it plans to rescind President Biden’s 2024 ban on drilling in more than half of the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The reserve holds an estimated 8.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but it is also some of the “last remaining pristine wilderness in the country,” The New York Times writes.
“Congress was clear: the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska was set aside to support America’s energy security through responsible development,” Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement announcing the proposed rule, further arguing that Biden’s ban had “ignored that mandate, prioritizing obstruction over production and undermining our ability to harness domestic resources at a time when American energy independence has never been more critical.” While the department’s announcement — which Burgum shared on Sunday at a heritage center in Utqiagvik, the largest city of the North Slope — was greeted with applause by attendees, Alaska’s senior manager for the Wilderness Society, Matt Jackson, said, “Everyone who cares about public lands and is concerned about the climate crisis should be outraged by this move to exploit America’s public lands for the benefit of corporations and the president’s wealthy donors.”
Applications for carbon capture and storage projects fell by 50% in the first quarter of the year as compared to last year, with no new permits having been approved since President Trump took office, the Financial Times reports. Industry experts blamed the uncertainty over the fate of federal grants and tax credits for the lowest application submissions since 2022 — a concern that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, since the Energy Department canceled nearly $4 billion in clean energy grants last week, including carbon capture and sequestration projects proposed by Heidelberg Materials and Calpine, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported. By BloombergNEF’s projections, an estimated 35% of the 152 million metric tons of announced carbon capture capacity expected to come online by 2035 will be canceled before then.
The Department of Energy has ordered Constellation Energy to continue operating its Eddystone power plant through the end of the summer to prevent potential electricity shortfalls on the mid-Atlantic grid, the Associated Press reports. The oil and gas plant, located south of Philadelphia, had been scheduled to shut down its last remaining units this weekend, before Constellation received the DOE’s emergency order.
Late last month, the DOE similarly ordered a coal-fired plant in Michigan to continue operating past its planned May 31 shutdown date, although the chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission said at the time that no energy emergency existed, Bloomberg reports. By contrast, the decision to order Eddystone’s continued operation followed PJM Interconnection expressing concerns about summer grid reliability; the operator has since voiced support for the DOE’s order. But the move also has its critics: “The Department of Energy’s move to keep these zombie plants online will have significant public health impacts and increase electricity costs for people in Michigan and Pennsylvania,” argued Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The European Union’s climate science advisers have warned the bloc against softening its 2040 emission goals, arguing that such a move could “undermine domestic value creation by diverting resources from the necessary transformation of the EU’s economy.” The European Commission is set to propose a binding target for member nations to cut emissions by 90% by 2040 from 1990 levels, but it is also considering allowing countries to set lower targets for their domestic industries and make up the gap using carbon credits, Reuters reports. The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, which issued its warning against the carbon credit loophole on Monday, described the original 90% emission reduction goal as achievable and necessary for both the health of Europeans as well as improving security by limiting the bloc’s reliance on foreign fossil fuel sources.
Oregon-based battery energy storage system integrator Powin has filed a notice with the state warning that it could lay off 250 employees and shut down operations by the end of July. Per the notification, the layoffs would include the company’s chief executives, and “it is presently contemplated that the affected employees will be permanently terminated.”
Powin has the third most gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in the U.S. and the fourth most worldwide. Still, turbulence due to tariffs and the Inflation Reduction Act incentives has reverberated through the industry, Latitude notes. In a statement provided to the publication, Powin described “navigating a period of significant financial challenge, reflective of ongoing headwinds in the broader energy storage industry.”
The partial shading of Colorado grasslands by solar arrays could decrease water stress and increase plant growth during dry years by 20% or more, a new study in Environmental Research Letters has found.
Or, why developers may be loading up on solar panels and transformers.
As the Senate gets to work on the budget reconciliation bill, renewables developers are staring down the extremely real possibility that the tax credits they’ve planned around may disappear sooner than expected. In the version of the bill that passed the House, most renewables projects would have to begin construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be “placed in service” — i.e. be up and running — by the end of 2028 to qualify for investment and production tax credits.
But that’s tax law language. The reconciliation bill will almost certainly mean grim tidings for the renewable industry, but it will be Christmas for the tax attorneys tasked with figuring out what it all means. They may be the only ones involved in the energy transition to come out ahead, David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright — “other than the lobbyists, of course,” he added with a laugh.
If the timeline restrictions on the investment and production tax credits make it to the final law, within 60 days after it’s enacted, developers will likely have to demonstrate that they’ve done some kind of physical work on a project — or spent a serious amount of money to advance it — in order to qualify for the tax credits.
The IRS has a couple of existing tests and guidelines: the 5% safe harbor and the physical work test.
The 5% harbor rule is the most common way to demonstrate a construction start, Burton told me. But it’s not cheap. That 5% refers to the total cost of a project, meaning that a company would have to shell out a lot of money very quickly to keep hold on those tax credits. For example, a 100-megawatt solar project that costs $1.25 per watt — about the average cost for a utility-scale project according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — would cost a developer $6.25 million in initial outlays just to prove they’ve started construction to the satisfaction of the IRS.
There are any number of things to spend that money on. “For solar, the most common thing is modules. But it could be inverters, it could be racking,” Burton said.
Right now there’s a particular rush to get transformers, the electrical equipment used to step up voltage for the transmission of electricity from a generator, Burton added. That’s because transformers also fall under the second construction guideline, the “physical work test.” Developers can say they’ve started construction “when physical work of a significant nature begins, provided that the taxpayer maintains a continuous program of construction,” according to the law firm Leo Berwick.
This “significant physical work” can be split into onsite and offsite work. The former is what one might logically think of as “construction” — something along the lines of pouring foundations for wind turbines or building a road to bring in equipment.
Then there’s offsite. Ordering equipment qualifies as offsite work, Burton explained. But it has to be something that’s not held in inventory — this is why modules for a solar project don’t qualify, Burton said — the equipment must be built to order. Transformers are custom designed for the specific project, and can run into the millions of dollars.
“The guidance says expressly that step-up transformers qualify for this,” Burton told me. “It’s the only thing that guidance expressly states qualifies.”
This all adds up to a likely rush for transformer orders, adding more pressure onto a sector that’s been chronically under-supplied.
“The transformer manufacturers’ phones are ringing off the hook,” Burton said. “If I were the CFO of a transformer manufacturer, I would be raising my prices.”
While these tax rules may seem bewildering to anyone not a lawyer, they’re hardly obscure to the industry, which is well aware of how developers might react and is positioning itself to take advantage of this likely rush to start projects.
PV Hardware, which makes a type of solar equipment called a tracker that allows solar panels to track the movement of the sun, sent out a press release last week letting the world know that “it has the capacity to immediately Safe Harbor 5GW of tracker product, offering solar developers a critical opportunity to preserve eligibility for current clean energy tax credits amid legislative uncertainty.” Its trackers, the release said, would help developers meet the “thresholds quickly, mitigating risk and preserving the long-term viability of their project.”
The prospect of tariffs has also been an impetus to get construction work started quickly, Mike Hall, chief executive of the solar and storage data company Anza, told Heatmap. “There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated, and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects,” Hall said.
But for projects that haven’t started, complying with the rules may be more tricky.
“For projects that are less far along in the pipeline and haven’t had any outlays or expenditures yet, those developers right now are scrambling,” Heather Cooper, a tax attorney at McDermott Will and Emery, told Heatmap. “I’ve gotten probably about 100 emails from my clients today asking me questions about what they can do to establish construction has begun on their project.”
And while developers of larger projects will literally have to do — or spend — more to qualify for tax credits under the new rule, they may still have an advantage.
“It’s increasingly clear to us that large-scale developers with the balance sheet and a pre-existing safe harbor program in place,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote to clients last week, “are easily best positioned to keep playing the game.”
Additional reporting by Jael Holzman