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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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On Energy Transfer’s legal win, battery storage, and the Cybertruck
Current conditions: Red flag warnings are in place for much of Florida • Spain is bracing for extreme rainfall from Storm Martinho, the fourth named storm in less than two weeks • Today marks the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring.
A jury has ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to one of the country’s largest fossil fuel infrastructure companies after finding the environmental group liable for defamation, conspiracy, and physical damages at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace participated in large protests, some violent and disruptive, at the pipeline in 2016, though it has maintained that its involvement was insignificant and came at the request of the local Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project eventually went ahead and is operational today, but Texas-based Energy Transfer sued the environmental organization, accusing it of inciting the uprising and encouraging violence. “We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal counsel for Greenpeace USA. The group said it plans to appeal.
The Department of Energy yesterday approved a permit for the Calcasieu Pass 2 liquified natural gas terminal in Louisiana, allowing the facility to export to countries without a free trade agreement. The project hasn’t yet been constructed and is still waiting for final approvals from the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, but the DOE’s green light means it faces one less hurdle.
CP2 was awaiting DOE’s go-ahead when the Biden administration announced its now notorious pause on approvals for new LNG export facilities. The project’s opponents argue it’s a “carbon bomb.” Analysis from the National Resources Defense Council suggested the greenhouse gases from the project would be equivalent to putting more than 1.85 million additional gas-fueled automobiles on the road, while the Sierra Club found it would amount to about 190 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually.
President Trump met with 15 to 20 major oil and gas executives from the American Petroleum Institute at the White House yesterday. This was the president’s first meeting with fossil fuel bosses since his second term began in January. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were also in the room. Everyone is staying pretty quiet about what exactly was said, but according to Burgum and Wright, the conversation focused heavily on permitting reform and bolstering the grid. Reuters reported that “executives had been expected to express concerns over Trump’s tariffs and stress the industry view that higher oil prices are needed to help meet Trump’s promise to grow domestic production.” Burgum, however, stressed that oil prices didn’t come up in the chat. “Price is set by supply and demand,” he said. “There was nothing we could say in that room that could change that one iota, and so it wasn’t really a topic of discussion.” The price of U.S. crude has dropped 13% since Trump returned to office, according to CNBC, on a combination of recession fears triggered by Trump’s tariffs and rising oil output from OPEC countries.
The U.S. installed 1,250 megawatts of residential battery storage last year, the highest amount ever and nearly 60% more than in 2023, according to a new report from the American Clean Power Association and Wood Mackenzie. Overall, battery storage installations across all sectors hit a new record in 2024 at 12.3 gigawatts of new capacity. Storage is expected to continue to grow next year, but uncertainties around tariffs and tax incentives could slow things down.
China is delaying approval for construction of BYD’s Mexico plant because authorities worry the electric carmaker’s technology could leak into the United States, according to the Financial Times. “The commerce ministry’s biggest concern is Mexico’s proximity to the U.S.,” sources told the FT. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer writes, BYD continues to set the global standard for EV innovation, and “American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up.” This week the company unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes.
Tesla has recalled 46,096 Cybertrucks over an exterior trim panel that can fall off and become a road hazard. This is the eighth recall for the truck since it went on sale at the end of 2023.
This fusion startup is ahead of schedule.
Thea Energy, one of the newer entrants into the red-hot fusion energy space, raised $20 million last year as investors took a bet on the physics behind the company’s novel approach to creating magnetic fields. Today, in a paper being submitted for peer review, Thea announced that its theoretical science actually works in the real world. The company’s CEO, Brian Berzin, told me that Thea achieved this milestone “quicker and for less capital than we thought,” something that’s rare in an industry long-mocked for perpetually being 30 years away.
Thea is building a stellarator fusion reactor, which typically looks like a twisted version of the more common donut-shaped tokamak. But as Berzin explained to me, Thea’s stellarator is designed to be simpler to manufacture than the industry standard. “We don’t like high tech stuff,” Berzin told me — a statement that sounds equally anathema to industry norms as the idea of a fusion project running ahead of schedule. “We like stuff that can be stamped and forged and have simple manufacturing processes.”
The company thinks it can achieve simplicity via its artificial intelligence software, which controls the reactor’s magnetic field keeping the unruly plasma at the heart of the fusion reaction confined and stabilized. Unlike typical stellarators, which rely on the ultra-precise manufacturing and installment of dozens of huge, twisted magnets, Thea’s design uses exactly 450 smaller, simpler planar magnets, arranged in the more familiar donut-shaped configuration. These magnets are still able to generate a helical magnetic field — thought to keep the plasma better stabilized than a tokamak — because each magnet is individually controlled via the company’s software, just like “the array of pixels in your computer screen,” Berzin told me.
“We’re able to utilize the control system that we built and very specifically modulate and control each magnet slightly differently,” Berzin explained, allowing Thea to “make those really complicated, really precise magnetic fields that you need for a stellarator, but with simple hardware.”
This should make manufacturing a whole lot easier and cheaper, Berzin told me. If one of Thea’s magnets is mounted somewhat imperfectly, or wear and tear of the power plant slightly shifts its location or degrades its performance over time, Thea’s AI system can automatically compensate. “It then can just tune that magnet slightly differently — it turns that magnet down, it turns the one next to it up, and the magnetic field stays perfect,” Berzin explained. As he told me, a system that relies on hardware precision is generally much more expensive than a system that depends on well-designed software. The idea is that Thea’s magnets can thus be mass manufactured in a way that’s conducive to “a business versus a science project.”
In 2023, Thea published a technical report proving out the physics behind its so-called “planar coil stellarator,” which allowed the company to raise its $20 million Series A last year, led by the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures. To validate the hardware behind its initial concept, Thea built a 3x3 array of magnets, representative of one section of its overall “donut” shaped reactor. This array was then integrated with Thea’s software and brought online towards the end of last year.
The results that Thea announced today were obtained during testing last month, and prove that the company can create and precisely control the complex magnetic field shapes necessary for fusion power. These results will allow the company to raise a Series B in the “next couple of years,” Berzin said. During this time, Thea will be working to scale up manufacturing such that it can progress from making one or two magnets per week to making multiple per day at its New Jersey-based facility.
The company’s engineers are also planning to stress test their AI software, such that it can adapt to a range of issues that could arise after decades of fusion power plant operation. “So we’re going to start breaking hardware in this device over the next month or two,” Berzin told me. “We’re purposely going to mismount a magnet by a centimeter, put it back in and not tell the control system what we did. And then we’re going to purposely short out some of the magnetic coils.” If the system can create a strong, stable magnetic field anyway, this will serve as further proof of concept for Thea’s software-oriented approach to a simplified reactor design.
The company is still years away from producing actual fusion power though. Like many others in the space, Thea hopes to bring fusion electrons to the grid sometime in the 2030s. Maybe this simple hardware, advanced software approach is what will finally do the trick.
The Chinese carmaker says it can charge EVs in 5 minutes. Can America ever catch up?
The Chinese automaker BYD might have cracked one of the toughest problems in electric cars.
On Tuesday, BYD unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes. That’s made possible because of a 1,000-volt architecture and what BYD describes as matching charging capability, which could theoretically add nearly one mile of range every second.
It’s still not entirely clear whether the technology actually works, although BYD has a good track record on that front. But it suggests that the highest-end EVs worldwide could soon add range as fast as gasoline-powered cars can now, eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to EV adoption.
The new charging platform won’t work everywhere. BYD says that it will also build 4,000 chargers across China that will be able to take advantage of these maximum speeds. If this pans out, then BYD will be able to charge its newest vehicles twice as fast as Tesla’s next generation of superchargers can.
“This is a good thing,” Jeremy Wallace, a Chinese studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “Yes, it’s a Chinese company. And there are geopolitical implications to that. But the better the technology gets, the easier it is to decarbonize.”
“As someone who has waited in line for chargers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I look forward to the day when charging doesn’t take that long,” he added.
The announcement also suggests that the Chinese EV sector remains as dynamic as ever and continues to set the global standard for EV innovation — and that American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up. The Trump administration is doing little to help the industry catch up: It has proposed repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for EV buyers, which provide demand-side support for the fledgling industry, and the Environmental Protection Agency is working to roll back tailpipe-pollution rules that have furnished early profits to EV makers, including Tesla. Against that background, what — if anything — can U.S. companies do to catch up?
The situation isn’t totally hopeless, but it’s not great.
BYD’s mega-charging capability is made possible by two underlying innovations. First, BYD’s new platform — the wiring, battery, and motors that make up the electronic guts of the car — will be capable of channeling up to 1,000 volts. That is only a small step-change above the best platforms available elsewhere— the forthcoming Gravity SUV from the American carmaker Lucid is built on a 926-volt platform, while the Cybertruck’s platform is 800 volts — but BYD will be able to leverage its technological firepower with mass manufacturing capacity unrivaled by any other brand.
Second, BYD’s forthcoming chargers will be capable of using the platform’s full voltage. These chargers may need to be built close to power grid infrastructure because of the amount of electricity that they will demand.
But sitting underneath these innovations is a sprawling technological ecosystem that keeps all Chinese electronics companies ahead — and that guarantees Chinese advantages well into the future.
“China’s decisive advantage over the U.S. when it comes to innovation is that it has an entrenched workforce that is able to continuously iterate on technological advances,” Dan Wang, a researcher of China’s technology industry and a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, told me.
The country is able to innovate so relentlessly because of its abundance of process knowledge, Wang said. This community of engineering practice may have been seeded by Apple’s iPhone-manufacturing effort in the aughts and Tesla’s carmaking prowess in the 2010s, but it has now taken on a life of its own.
“Shenzhen is the center of the world’s hardware manufacturing industry because it has workers rubbing shoulders with academics rubbing shoulders with investors rubbing shoulders with engineers,” Wang told me. “And you have a more hustle-type culture because it’s so much harder to maintain technological moats and technological differentiation, because people are so competitive in these sorts of spaces.”
In a way, Shenzhen is the modern-day version of the hardware and software ecosystem that used to exist in northern California — Silicon Valley. But while the California technology industry now largely focuses on software, China has taken over the hardware side.
That allows the country to debut new technological innovations much faster than any other country can, he added. “The comparison I hear is that if you have a new charging platform or a new battery chemistry, Volkswagen and BMW will say, We’ll hustle to put this into our systems, and we’ll put it in five years from now. Tesla might say, we’ll hustle and get it in a year from now.”
“China can say, we’ll put it in three months from now,” he said.“You have a much more focused concentration of talent in China, which collapses coordination time.”
That culture has allowed the same companies and engineers to rapidly advance in manufacturing skill and complexity. It has helped CATL, which originally made batteries for smartphones, to become one of the world’s top EV battery makers. And it has helped BYD — which is close to unseating Tesla as the world’s No. 1 seller of electric vehicles — move from making lackluster gasoline cars to some of the world’s best and cheapest EVs.
It will be a while until America can duplicate that manufacturing capability, partly because of the number of headwinds it faces, Wang said.