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“The judiciary is capable and duty-bound to provide redress for the irreparable harm government fossil fuel promotion has caused.”
In the last days of 2023, Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon ended an argument that had lasted eight years and three presidential administrations. Juliana v. United States, a groundbreaking climate case filed by a group of twenty one young plaintiffs in federal court, could finally go to trial.
“The judiciary is capable and duty-bound to provide redress for the irreparable harm government fossil fuel promotion has caused,” Aiken wrote in her opinion. “Some may balk at the Court’s approach as errant or unmeasured, but more likely than not, future generations may look back to this hour and say that the judiciary failed to measure up at all. In any case over which trial courts have jurisdiction, where the plaintiffs have stated a legal claim, it is the proper and peculiar province of the courts to impartially find facts, faithfully interpret and apply the law, and render reasoned judgment. Such is the case here.”
This might sound a bit familiar to regular readers of Heatmap; last year, I wrote about Held v. Montana, a case in Montana filed by youth plaintiffs who argued that the state government was violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by ignoring the environmental impacts of energy projects. The judge in that case, Kathy Seeley, ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in August.
There are certainly some similarities between the cases: Both groups of plaintiffs, for example, are represented by Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm that’s filed youth climate cases around the country; and both cases hinged on the idea that a failure to mitigate climate change is a violation of plaintiffs’ rights. But Held is a state-level case, and its ramifications will only be felt in Montana. Juliana, on the other hand, is going through the federal court system, and could eventually end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
At issue, in the simplest terms, is whether the U.S. government has a duty to protect the climate for public use, and whether its friendliness towards fossil fuels violates that duty. A win — however unlikely it may be — would give environmental advocates an incredibly powerful tool for future climate action: federal precedent.
The case has had a long journey. “This path to justice has been over eight long years in coming,” said Julia Olson, OTC’s founder and Chief Legal Council, in a statement. “Finally, in 2024, the Juliana plaintiffs will have their long-awaited trial and the federal government’s fossil fuel energy system will be measured and judged by the fundamental constitutional rights of these youth. Our democracy will be stronger for it.”
Not that the government is going to go down easy. “Each administration has had its own defense strategy,” James May, founder of the Global Environmental Rights Institute at Widener University Delaware Law School, told me. The case has bounced around between courts in part because of an idea known as “redressability,” May told me — in essence, whether or not the judiciary can provide redress to the plaintiffs.
The Obama administration tried to have the case dismissed on standing, saying that climate change was a matter to be addressed by the political branches of government. After that failed, the Trump Justice Department tried accusing lower courts of overreach in considering the case at all, an argument that also failed to move judges. The plaintiffs amended their complaint in 2021, by which point the case was in front of Biden’s DOJ. The Biden administration revisited Obama-era tactics, refashioning them to claim that the judiciary was not able to provide the plaintiffs with a remedy.
Aiken remained unmoved. “That unnecessarily narrow view overlooks one clear and constitutional path to shielding future generations from impacts of the onslaught of environmental disaster: that it is the responsibility of the judiciary to declare the law that the government may not deprive the People of their Constitutional guarantee of the God-given right to life,” she wrote.
May, for his part, agrees with Aiken — the court doesn’t have to figure out a fix for climate change, he said; all it has to do is decide if there’s been a constitutional violation, which would be a form of redress itself.
The mere fact that this case could go to trial puts the Biden administration in an awkward position. The plaintiffs filed their case in 2015, and the basic argument they made was that the U.S. government’s policies should align with the goals set out in the Paris Agreement of that same year. “So if the Biden administration fights this case, then it will raise questions about how committed it is to addressing climate change,” May told me. “But if it doesn’t, it will have to defend a brand new constitutional claim that nobody [outside of this district court in Oregon] has recognized. And the Department of Justice is unlikely to be comfortable with that.”
Olson gave some color on her team’s interactions with the Biden administration to Jacobin for a 2022 article. “I have asked [them] very directly, if we win this motion, and we can move forward with the case, do you intend to go to trial?” she said. “Their response has always been something along the lines of, ‘It is our position that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction and that this case should never go to trial.’” The Biden administration, the article said, didn’t respond to Jacobin’s requests for comment.
Some environmental activists worry that losing in front of a Supreme Court packed with conservative justices could be a blow to the environmental justice movement at large, but May thinks otherwise. “The plaintiffs are kind of playing with house money,” he said. “If they lose before the Supreme Court, so what? That kind of a [constitutional] claim has never been recognized. There has to be a first time you try it.”
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Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.