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Net zero was never going to be easy, but between AI and Trump, it just got a whole lot harder.
Of all of the executives who have cozied up to President Donald Trump over the past two months, Mark Zuckerberg has appeared perhaps the most eager.
In the weeks before Trump took power, the Meta CEO scrambled to ditch his company’s fact-checking program, rolled back hate speech protections, and took an ax to Meta’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (reportedly with the blessing of Trump’s current deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller). The billionaire founder has named Joel Kaplan, a former energy executive and a prominent Republican, to the role of vice president of global public policy and, on the night of Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg — who President Trump once said could spend “life in prison” — wrote on Instagram that he was “optimistic and celebrating.”
Zuckerberg has since tried to assure Meta’s left-leaning employees that the company is holding true to its values, but in an all-hands meeting in January, he stated plainly, “We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government, and we’re going to take that.”
The question now is just where Meta’s climate goals will fit in this partnership.
Since taking office, President Trump has used executive orders to pause tens of billions of dollars in environmental and energy spending and stop all new wind energy permits from going forward. He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and declared a “national energy emergency” designed to speed up approvals for energy projects — that is, with the exception of renewable energy projects.
The courts will ultimately decide the fate of these orders. But as Zuckerberg strains to stay in the new president’s good graces, the White House’s fossil fuel boosterism could complicate Meta’s climate commitments. That’s particularly true given that those commitments were already on shaky ground in the midst of the energy-sucking boom in artificial intelligence.
While Zuckerberg has never made climate action his primary cause, in a speech to Harvard graduates in 2017, he did call on the class to join in “stopping climate change before we destroy the planet.” And Meta has worked hard to do its part. Since 2020, the company has achieved net zero emissions throughout its operations, thanks to a combination of renewable energy credits, carbon removal investments, and the direct use of solar and wind energy to reduce its emissions. By 2023, it had the largest renewable energy portfolio of any corporate buyer in the country, and just last year, it struck what it said was a “first-of-its-kind” partnership to power its data centers with geothermal energy.
But beyond accounting for its operational emissions, the company has also committed to achieving net zero emissions throughout its value chain, from the copper wires spiraling through these gargantuan data centers to the construction materials used to build them.
That’s a far more challenging goal, particularly when every AI company is trying to build out their computing capacity as quickly as possible, said one former Meta employee familiar with the company’s climate and energy strategy. (The employee asked to remain anonymous to discuss private matters.) “The fear in the back of people’s minds is someone is going to say: These are voluntary commitments, and we’re just not going to do it anymore,” the former employee said, noting the “herd mentality” of Big Tech. “If one domino falls, do others?”
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on how the company’s climate goals may be impacted by the changing political landscape and didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether this week’s layoffs have impacted sustainability work. But in its most recent sustainability report, Meta acknowledged that meeting its net zero goals by 2030 “will be significantly harder” in the age of AI. “The challenge of reaching our sustainability goals given the increased demand for energy and resources driven by AI is not unique to Meta,” wrote Rachel Peterson, Meta’s vice president of infrastructure for data centers. Indeed, Google and Microsoft have both said they’re falling short of their climate targets, and in 2023 alone, Meta’s own data center energy use spiked 34%. Peterson wrote that this demand “will require major shifts in how companies like ours operate.”
Some of those shifts are already underway. Shortly after the election, Meta issued a request for proposals for nuclear developers with the goal of adding up to 4 gigawatts of new nuclear generation capacity — enough to power a small city — by the 2030s.
Though the company has plenty of apolitical reasons to pursue nuclear power and plenty of company among tech giants investing in the space, it doesn’t hurt that nuclear power is also more politically palatable at this moment. Just last week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fossil fuel executive, promised to “unleash commercial nuclear power,” even as he skewered the pursuit of a net-zero future. Wright’s secretarial order made not a single mention of solar and wind power, which make up the bulk of Meta’s renewable energy mix.
Meta’s push into nuclear by no means indicates it’s giving up on wind and solar. A Meta spokesperson pointed me to a new agreement Meta struck last week to purchase 115 megawatts of power from an Oklahoma wind farm. (Google reportedly struck its own wind deal earlier this month in Virginia.) But it does mean Meta is diversifying its energy mix to keep up with AI demand at a time when the federal government is least likely to get in its way.
“There’s been no repudiation of the climate goals,” Benjamin C. Lee, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was previously a visiting scientist at Meta AI working on data center energy usage, told me. “It’s just that there simply isn’t enough wind and solar, and if you’re looking to build another 100 megawatt data center, you have to get the energy.” (Lee is now a visiting scientist at Google.)
“Energy of any kind trumps no energy,” he added.
That includes energy from natural gas. A few weeks after the election, Meta said it would build its largest data center yet — a 4 million square foot behemoth — in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which will be powered by three new natural gas plants. Meta’s announcement made no mention of the site’s power demands, but instead emphasized how the company planned to offset its impact by investing in community action grants, water stewardship, and adding enough new clean and renewable energy projects to the grid to cover 100% of the data center’s electricity needs.
But Zuckerberg left all of that out of his post about the project on Threads in January. Instead, just days after President Trump announced a new $500 billion AI data center partnership between Oracle, OpenAI, and Softbank, Zuckerberg boasted that “Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”
The pandering post signaled a pivot — not necessarily in Meta’s actual plans for the data center, but in its climate-friendly messaging about it. In Zuckerberg’s telling, the data center’s sheer size, not its attempts at sustainability, were the selling point.
Still, despite these rhetorical moves, three people I spoke with who have previously worked at Meta on energy and sustainability issues are doubtful that the company’s substantial investments in renewable energy — particularly solar energy — are going away. That’s largely because solar is still often cheaper than other forms of energy. Even if the political case is diminished, they said, the business case is still there.
But investing in renewables alone won’t get Meta to its ultimate goal. Achieving net zero emissions throughout the value chain requires relying on materials that often do carry a cost premium. And it requires doing that at a time when AI companies are racing to one-up each other by building bigger data centers faster than ever before.
It’s those commitments that appear far more vulnerable, particularly when the White House is offering every excuse for corporate America to give them up. “Net zero was always going to fall by the wayside, but that was because of AI,” said Lee. “The question is whether the gap between what we had hoped to achieve and where we are becomes larger.”
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.