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You can turn even the wonkiest policy into a culture war issue if you try hard enough.
“We need a leader,” said JD Vance as he accepted the Republican nomination for vice president, “who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories.” The election, he said, is “about the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying their jobs,” and “the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world, when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in our own country.”
This is the tale Vance tells about energy and climate — one of contempt and betrayal, elitists sacrificing hard-working blue-collar Americans on the altar of their alien schemes. On the surface it may sound like it’s about jobs and economics, but it’s really about the eternal culture war that divides us from them.
This is nothing new. Maintaining this artificial division between environmental and economic concerns is central to the effort to protect the fossil fuel industry, and has been for decades. Voters must be convinced that any attempt to do something about climate change is not just unserious but an assault on virtuous working people waged from Washington and other places controlled by the snobbish liberal elite.
The argument plays on beliefs about environmentalism that go back decades. Beginning in the 1970s, a group of political scientists led by Ronald Inglehart drew attention to a change in public opinion in advanced societies around the world, as “post-materialist values” based on autonomy and self-expression grew in political prominence. The generations that grew up after World War II, they argued, were less focused on material scarcity and more concerned with issues like abortion, equal rights for women and minority groups, and the environment.
The idea that environmental concerns were separate from economics — that they are fundamentally cultural and not material — has always been used by the right to discredit environmentalism and those who advocate for it. As George H.W. Bush said about Al Gore in 1992 when Gore’s warnings about climate change were considered a little wacky, “This guy is so far off in the environmental extreme, we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American.”
Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. But the solutions have also gotten more real.
In Vance’s home state, for instance, an “energy worker” is much more likely to be working in green energy than fossil fuels; as Semafor recently noted, “Clean energy-related companies now employ about 114,000 people in Ohio, compared to 71,000 working in oil and gas.” The state is enjoying something of a solar boom, as well as a significant increase in production of batteries that will power the electric vehicles Vance and his running mate despise. The “great American factories” Vance celebrates apparently don’t include projects like the joint LG-Honda battery plant in Jeffersonville, an hour’s drive from his home town of Middletown, which will complete construction later this year and is slated to employ 2,200 of his constituents.
But in the picture painted by Trump, Vance, and others running on the anti-anti-climate change agenda, there is essentially no such thing as a green job; efforts to lower emissions have only costs and no benefits. And the cost is not just to our economy but to our spirit, making us impotent and weak. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who may well become Secretary of Energy if Trump wins, began his convention speech with a call-and-response to the audience. “Who will make America energy dominant?” he asked three times, to which the audience responded, “Donald Trump!” “Energy dominant” has replaced “energy independent” as the goal for the Trump-era GOP, not surprising given that dominance and submission is one of the central themes of Trump’s life.
“Energy dominance” isn’t so much a practical state of affairs as a feeling, the sense that our heads are held high and others grovel before us, whether that has any relation to reality or not. After all, under Joe Biden the country is about as energy dominant as it could be, and not always for the best. America is not only producing more oil than any country in the world, it’s producing more than any country in human history. We’re also the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas.
Yet according to Burgum, the next four years will bring either an apocalypse of enfeeblement as we huddle together in darkness or an explosion of manly strength, depending on which president we elect. “Imagine: no electricity for your fridge, your lights or air conditioning,” he warned. “President Trump will ensure there’s power for you, and importantly, that we have the power as the United States to beat China in the AI arms race.” You can almost feel the power Trump will give you, like a steroid shot to the national soul — or a dose of something even more potent. “Teddy Roosevelt encouraged America to speak softly and carry a big stick,” Burgum went on. “Energy dominance will be the big stick that President Trump will carry.” To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a stick is just a stick — but not this time, I think.
All that was no doubt music to the ears of the American Petroleum Institute, one of the convention’s sponsors, as well as both Trump and Vance, who has introduced a bill to repeal the EV subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act and replace them with subsidies for internal combustion vehicles. “The whole EV thing is a scam,” Vance has said.
In other words: Don’t be fooled when Democrats tell you that climate change is an economic threat and that transitioning to a green economy will actually increase prosperity. All you need to know is that the “Green New Scam” is being imposed by the people you hate.
Those resisting climate action would prefer that voters continue to see it as solely a cultural issue, as though the environmental conversation were still confined to beautifying highways and picking up litter, something we can set aside with no material cost. But the truth is that culture and economics are entwined, and always have been. The Republicans who took the stage in Milwaukee to rail against green energy and present themselves as the protectors of the working class understand that only too well.
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What happened this week in climate and energy policy, beyond the federal election results.
1. It’s the election, stupid – We don’t need to retread who won the presidential election this week (or what it means for the Inflation Reduction Act). But there were also big local control votes worth watching closely.
2. Michigan lawsuit watch – Michigan has a serious lawsuit brewing over its law taking some control of renewable energy siting decisions away from municipalities.
A conversation with Frank Wolak of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association.
We’re joined today by Frank Wolak, CEO of perhaps the most crucial D.C. trade group for all things hydrogen: the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association. The morning after Election Day we chatted about whether Trump 2.0 will be as receptive as members of Congress have been to hydrogen and the IRA’s tax credit for producing the fuel. Let’s look inside his crystal ball, shall we?
Simply put, will president-elect Donald Trump keep the IRA’s 45V tax credit in place?
So a couple things there. First, the production tax credit still has to be finalized and what they do about the tax credits, if anything, is a function of whether the Biden administration issues final guidance.
If they issue final guidance, then what that guidance says will determine what kind of reaction the Trump administration may have, whether to adjust it or tweak it.
The second thing: I think the tax credits fit into a question of the IRA broadly and hydrogen specifically. The Trump administration is going to be looking at the entirety of the IRA. There’s the question of what pushback hydrogen has in this administration and if it’s viewed as valuable or important or secondary, tertiary to other things. And I think we’ve yet to see that in the form of any platform.
So Trump’s view on hydrogen is a mystery then – how will that uncertainty impact hydrogen projects in development today?
The uncertainty that has been experienced by this industry predates the election outcome. The long wait for guidance has definitely slowed down the amount of investment. They’ve put many things on hold. This is not a secret.
What I’ll say is, the ability to regroup and fulfill the expectations that this industry had two or three years ago is hugely dependent on the outcome of the tax credit.
What do you think we’ll see companies do in this information vacuum? Will we see them double down on supporting the credit or potentially get out of hydrogen since it’s an emerging, nascent technology?
The doubling down on the tax credit depends on what the guidance looks like.
If the guidance looks flexible, the question is: how do you take that flexibility and make sure the Trump administration continues it and sees it as valuable or vital?
If the tax credit becomes rigid and stays rigid in the Biden administration, you’ll have a two step process – to unwind the rigidity and then also encourage the Trump administration to see the merits. If the guidance stays as stated, the work is harder.
The degree to which industry continues to make investments and says, “hey, we’re all in,” is a function of how these tax credits emerged. Are they going to really keep fighting and to keep the momentum going, or are the [credits] so limited that companies go, “look this is going to be very very hard to overcome in the U.S. so we’re going to take our investment elsewhere.”
You think we might see companies dip out of the hydrogen space over the credit’s outcome?
Mature long term players who are multinationals … are remaining extremely positive. They may adjust the sequence of their investments but they’re in this because they’re in hydrogen and want to be in this market as much as possible.
But those who saw this as an opportunity to come in and take advantage of tax credits are having those reactions of, “Should I invest? Do I look [at it] positively?” And that’s probably natural.
On the looming climate summit, clean energy stocks, and Hurricane Rafael
Current conditions: A winter storm could bring up to 4 feet of snow to parts of Colorado and New Mexico • At least 89 people are still missing from extreme flooding in Spain • The Mountain Fire in Southern California has consumed 14,000 acres and is zero percent contained.
The world is still reeling from the results of this week’s U.S. presidential election, and everyone is trying to get some idea of what a second Trump term means for policy – both at home and abroad. Perhaps most immediately, Trump’s election is “set to cast a pall over the UN COP29 summit next week,” said the Financial Times. Already many world leaders and business executives have said they will not attend the climate talks in Azerbaijan, where countries will aim to set a new goal for climate finance. “The U.S., as the world’s richest country and key shareholder in international financial institutions, is viewed as crucial to that goal,” the FT added.
Trump has called climate change a hoax, vowed to once again remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, and promised to stop U.S. climate finance contributions. He has also promised to “drill, baby, drill.” Yesterday President Biden put new environmental limitations on an oil-and-gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The lease sale was originally required by law in 2017 by Trump himself, and Biden is trying to “narrow” the lease sale without breaking that law, according to The Washington Post. “The election results have made the threat to America's Arctic clear,” Kristen Miller, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, toldReuters. “The fight to save the Arctic Refuge is back, and we are ready for the next four years.”
Another early effect of the decisive election result is that clean energy stocks are down. The iShares Global Clean Energy exchange traded fund, whose biggest holdings are the solar panel company First Solar and the Spanish utility and renewables developer Iberdola, is down about 6%. The iShares U.S. Energy ETF, meanwhile, whose largest holdings are Exxon and Chevron, is up over 3%. Some specific publicly traded clean energy stocks have sunk, especially residential solar companies like Sunrun, which is down about 30% compared to Tuesday. “That renewables companies are falling more than fossil energy companies are rising, however, indicates that the market is not expecting a Trump White House to do much to improve oil and gas profitability or production, which has actually increased in the Biden years thanks to the spikes in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and continued exploitation of America’s oil and gas resources through hydraulic fracturing,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.
Hurricane Rafael swept through Cuba yesterday as a Category 3 storm, knocking out the power grid and leaving 10 million people without electricity. Widespread flooding is reported. The island was still recovering from last month’s Hurricane Oscar, which left at least six people dead. The electrical grid – run by oil-fired power plants – has collapsed several times over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said yesterday that about 17% of crude oil production and 7% of natural gas output in the Gulf of Mexico was shut down because of Rafael.
It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the warmest year on record, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service. In October, the global average surface air temperature was about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than pre-industrial averages for that month. This year is also on track to be the first entire calendar year in which temperatures are more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. “This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference,” said Copernicus deputy director Dr. Samantha Burgess.
C3S
The world is falling short of its goal to double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, the International Energy Agency said in its new Energy Efficiency 2024 report. Global primary energy intensity – which the IEA explained is a measure of efficiency – will improve by 1% this year, the same as last year. It needs to be increasing by 4% by the end of the decade to meet a goal set at last year’s COP. “Boosting energy efficiency is about getting more from everyday technologies and industrial processes for the same amount of energy input, and means more jobs, healthier cities and a range of other benefits,” the IEA said. “Improving the efficiency of buildings and vehicles, as well as in other areas, is central to clean energy transitions, since it simultaneously improves energy security, lowers energy bills for consumers and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.” The group called for more government action as well as investment in energy efficient technologies.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon fell by 30.6% in the 12 months leading up to July, compared to a year earlier. It is now at the lowest levels since 2015.