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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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Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 28 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, 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: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination will hit clean energy and oil majors alike, including Exxon and Chevron.
A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination obtained by Heatmap reveals an additional 338 awards for clean energy projects that the agency intends to cancel. Combined with the 321 grants the agency said it was terminating last week, the total value is nearly $24 billion.
While last week’s announcement mostly targeted companies and institutions located in Democratic states, the new list appears to be indiscriminate. Conrad Schneider, the senior U.S. director at Clean Air Task Force, told me in a statement that the move “will have far-reaching consequences — with virtually no region unscathed.”
“The federal government plays an essential role in addressing gaps that stall the commercialization of energy breakthroughs by providing grants and loans to accelerate innovative projects,” he said. “By abruptly canceling funding for several hundred energy projects, the U.S. risks ceding American energy leadership and signals that U.S. innovation is not a priority.”
Some of the most significant new terminations on the list include:
While two of the seven hydrogen hubs — those in California and the Pacific Northwest — were on last week’s cancellations list, all seven have their status listed as “terminate” on this new list. That includes hubs that planned to make hydrogen from natural gas based in Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, Texas, and the Midwest.
Those awards came out of $8 billion allocated by Congress in the IIJA in 2021 to develop hubs where companies and states would work together to produce and test the use of cleaner hydrogen fuel in new industries. The move would hit oil majors in addition to green energy companies. Exxon and Chevron were partners on the Hyvelocity hydrogen hub on the Gulf Coast.
“If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told me. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses."
The Inflation Reduction Act’s Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grants, which were meant to support the conversion of shuttered or at-risk auto plants to be able to manufacture electric vehicles and their supply chains, would be fully obliterated based on the new list. All 13 grants that were awarded under the program are there, including $80 million for Blue Bird’s new electric school bus plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, $500 million for General Motors’ Grant River Assembly Plant in Lansing, Michigan, and $285 million for Mercedes-Benz’s next-generation electric van plant in Ladson, South Carolina.
Some of the other projects slated for termination raise questions about other projects from the same grant program that are not on the list. For example, a $45 million grant for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association to deploy microgrids in seven communities shows up as terminated, along with several other awards made as part of the IIJA’s Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas program. Grants for indigenous tribes in Alaska, Wisconsin, and throughout the Southwest from that program appear to be preserved, however.
A $9.8 million grant to Sparkz to build a first-of-its-kind battery-grade iron phosphate plant in West Virginia also makes an appearance. The award was made as part of a nearly $430 million funding round from the IIJA to accelerate domestic clean energy manufacturing in 15 former coal communities. Similar awards made to Anthro Energy in Louisville, Kentucky, Infinitum in Rockdale, Texas, Mainspring Energy in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, and a company called MetOx International developing an advanced superconductor manufacturing facility in the Southeast appear to be safe.
When asked about the new list, DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told me by email that he couldn’t attest to its validity. He added that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,” referring to the earlier 321 cancellations.