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The Earth will have one less friend in Congress.
There will be many chances this week to dissect why two-term New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost his primary to Westchester County Executive George Latimer, which The Associated Press called less than an hour after the polls closed on Tuesday. Post mortems will focus on the financial angle (the 16th District primary was the most expensive in House history) and, of course, the Israel-Palestine angle (nearly $15 million alone came from an American Israel Public Affairs Committee-affiliated super PAC that aggressively portrayed Bowman as antisemitic). Others will say it had been a forgone conclusion and point to the disturbing way Latimer co-opted Republican racial dog-whistles in his attacks, or claim Bowman sabotaged his own chances by shifting too far to the left.
It’s probably still a stretch to say that Bowman’sresounding loss was a referendum on progressive climate movements like Sunrise, which attached itself both to Bowman and to the Green New Deal. But look at it the other way around: In the context of Governor Kathy Hochul’s reneging on congestion pricing and the state legislature’s failure to pass the NY HEAT Act, one of the staunchest allies of progressive climate policy losing his election represents another blow to New York’s image as a national leader on the issue — and its ability to remain one.
The Sunrise Movement played a pivotal role in Bowman’s 2020 win against 30-year incumbent Eliot Engel — who was, himself, an original co-sponsor of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal bill. But Bowman, then 44, represented a fresh face for environmentally minded progressives in a district that once voted more overwhelmingly for Barack Obama than any other locality in the county. When Bowman ultimately defeated the then-73-year-old establishment figure, he also became the first Black representative of the majority minority district that covers the southern half of Westchester County and the northern lip of the Bronx.
In Congress, Bowman’s senior policy advisor reportedly helped spur Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer into action on the Inflation Reduction Act during the summer of 2022. Somewhat less gloriously, Bowman became only the 27th member of Congress to be censured after he pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol during spending bill negotiations. (He claimed he thought it opened a door.) But his legacy also includes the pursuit of progressive climate policies, such as the Sunrise-backed Green New Deal for Public Schools Act, which he’s introduced in each of the past two congressional sessions and, if passed, would invest $1.6 trillion to reduce emissions and lower environmental justice-related barriers at public schools. Still, that sort of aggressive public spending hasn’t always sat right with the powers that be in the Democratic Party; tellingly, Hillary Clinton endorsed Bowman’s challenger, Latimer, even as pro-Trumpers poured money into his campaign.
Fast-forward to 2024, and the Sunrise Movement is going through a reckoning of its own over whether President Biden’s climate record outweighs his handling of the crisis in Gaza. (Ironically, Bowman “probably had the worst politics on the issue of any Squad member early on in his tenure,” the progressive Discourse Bloghas argued.)
That’s not to say that the climate is “losing” to Middle East policy in Americans’ hearts and minds, exactly; on the contrary, climate is a proven election winner, albeit not always in those words. “The NY16 race is a setback for the climate movement, but it also shows the popularity of our ideas,” Saul Levin, the campaigns and political director of the Green New Deal Network, wrote me. “It took the most money in primary history and GOP donors to buy Green New Deal champion Jamaal Bowman’s seat.”
But elections are about, and influenced by, many things, and whatever the combination of reasons may be, the truth stands that with Bowman’s defeat, Congress is now down one more progressive climate ally than it otherwise would have been. (Latimer has called climate change an “existential threat” but has not foregrounded it as a primary concern.)
Bowman’s loss might not sound like much in the bigger picture of the many climate elections happening this year — including, of course, the Big One. But if former President Donald Trump manages to take back the White House this November, every House and Senate seat sympathetic to the urgent realities of climate change will matter critically. That’s not to say, necessarily, that Latimer won’t fight for such causes, but it seems unlikely he’ll be a leader the way Bowman and other Squad members have been, at times pushing more centrist Democrats further to the left and to action.
So yes, you can draw many conclusions from the 16th District primary — that it represents the collapse of the progressive influence of groups like Sunrise; or that, with Bowman being the first Squad member to lose reelection, it reveals a growing impatience with absolutist politics; or that big-money interests have finally figured out a winning strategy in outspending scrappy underdogs; or how all these things in combination might spell trouble for Biden in a few months. But a loss is a loss, and it’s the nature of post mortems to leave out the most important question: What happens next?
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.