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Who gets to block an energy project?
One of the longest-running environmental controversies of Joe Biden’s presidency is now over, but it presages much bigger controversies to come.
Last week, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303-mile natural gas project that will link West Virginia’s booming gas fields to the East Coast’s mainline gas infrastructure. The justices lifted a halt on the project that had been imposed by a lower court. In doing so, they all but guaranteed that the project will get built.
But even if the Mountain Valley Pipeline case is over, the issues and questions at the center of the dispute are not. And they suggest that a profound and unanswered tension sits at the heart of environmental and climate law — one that concerns not only conservation, but the very nature of American democracy as well.
While environmental advocates have fought the pipeline for years, it only became a national issue when Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia began to champion the pipeline last year. He insisted that the Biden administration back the project in exchange for his support of Biden’s flagship climate and spending bill, which became the Inflation Reduction Act.
After several failed efforts, Manchin finally found a way to help the pipeline this spring, when he got Congress to automatically approve the project as part of the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 — better known as the debt-ceiling deal — ordered federal agencies to issue every outstanding permit necessary for the pipeline’s construction. It declared that those permits could not be challenged in court.
Furthermore, it said that legal challenges to this accelerated decision could not be heard by the Fourth Circuit, the appeals court with jurisdiction over West Virginia, but only by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The D.C. Circuit is often described as the country’s second most powerful court; more saliently, fewer of its judges were appointed by Democratic presidents.
And that seemed like the end of the story. But in June, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups sued to block the Mountain Valley Pipeline again. They now alleged that Congress had violated a key Constitutional idea — the separation of powers — by rushing to approve the pipeline.
Specifically, they argued that the debt-ceiling deal violated a 151-year-old case called United States v. Klein, or just Klein for short. In that case, which revolved around several hundred cotton bales seized in Mississippi during the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not pass a law that forced a court to rule on a case in a certain way. In other words, Congress may not pass a law that says: If Smith sues Jones, Smith wins.
The Sierra Club and others argue that Congress violated Klein when it automatically approved the pipeline in the debt-ceiling bill. The pipeline had been mired in permit-related lawsuits in the Fourth Circuit for years; its construction has led to dozens of alleged water-quality violations. So when Congress granted those permit approvals anyway, it was essentially doing an end-run around the appeals court. That was a clear-cut violation of Klein, environmentalists argue.
Is it so simple? In a brief supporting the pipeline, Laborer’s International Union of America argues that Congress acted entirely within its authority. Congress has essentially unlimited authority to authorize agency actions and revise court jurisdiction, the union says.
But here is the rub. To make their case, environmentalists appealed to Chief Justice John Roberts — specifically a dissent he wrote back in 2018.
That year, the Court declined to strike down an Obama-era law that told courts to “promptly dismiss” any lawsuits challenging a tribal casino in Michigan. But the majority could not agree about why, and three conservative justices — led by Roberts — dissented, arguing that the Obama-era law violated Klein because it forced the Court’s hand on a lawsuit, even if the lawsuit in question had not been filed yet.
In their case against the pipeline, the environmentalists urged the Court to adopt the logic of that dissent. And that may reveal something surprising about the tack taken by environmental groups here: Their arguments draw from what has increasingly come to seem like a conservative approach to Constitutional law. And while there are understandable reasons for this, it shows that the environmental movement may be facing a deeper crisis than it realizes. The questions now confronting the climate movement go to the center of questions over American democracy.
Above all: Who gets to rule in the American republic, and who gets to determine what is and isn’t constitutional? This is a live debate, and it goes to the center of contemporary fights over permitting reform. It is worth dwelling on for a moment.
The standard historical line is the Supreme Court, above all, decides what is and isn’t Constitutional — a power that it has claimed for itself since Marbury v. Madison in 1803.
But there is another tradition in American life, which holds that the American people, not the justices, are the final arbiter of constitutionality. President Abraham Lincoln backed this view in the run-up to the Civil War. And so did the men who created the Klein crisis.
Klein did not come out of nowhere. The case emerged during one of the most wrenching moments in our Constitutional history, when radicals and moderates battled over the meaning of the Civil War in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination.
On one side, Radical Republicans in Congress wanted to enshrine equality at the heart of the American republic, protecting the economic and civil freedoms of newly emancipated Black people and harshly punishing their traitorous Southern enslavers. On the other, moderate Republicans and Democrats sought a more reconciliatory approach to Reconstruction, welcoming former Confederate elites back into American life.
This is the background of Klein. When Congress passed the 1870 law that provoked the Klein lawsuit, it sought to prevent ex-Confederates from claiming federal money as compensation for their losses. It wanted to block a man named John Klein from being paid for cotton bales seized from his client during the Civil War, specifically because Congress believed that his client had been part of the rebellion and therefore did not deserve federal funds.
But that was part of a much broader fight between Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, in which radical Republican lawmakers sought to assert the people’s — and therefore Congress’s — authority to govern the other branches. Since the people created the Constitution, radicals argued, then the people had final authority over the courts that it made. “It would be a sad day for American institutions and for the sacred cause of Republican Governments if any tribunal in this land, created by the will of the people, was above and superior to the people’s power,” Representative John Bingham, an Ohio radical and the leading author of the Fourteenth Amendment, said.
That theory was revived 60 years later, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved to rein in a Supreme Court that kept striking down his New Deal programs. He proposed packing the court with more favorable justices, arguing that the three branches of the Constitution were like a team of three horses pulling a wagon. “It is the American people themselves who are in the driver’s seat,” he said, and therefore the people who should determine the make-up of the Court.
Although Roosevelt’s packing scheme failed, it resulted in one of the Court’s more conservative justices switching to become a more reliably pro-New Deal vote. And since Democrats controlled the Senate for all but four of the following 43 years, the Court lurched in a more liberal direction through much of the 20th century. By the 1990s, the judiciary was the favored branch of establishment liberalism, an august arbiter of civil protections as enacted in Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, and Roe v. Wade.
No longer. Faced with the most conservative Supreme Court in 90 years, progressives have rediscovered this forgotten controversy in the Constitution. Congress, they argue, has the power and duty to regulate the Supreme Court when it strays too far from popular will. The text of the Constitution allows Congress to set exceptions to the Court’s “appellate jurisdiction,” meaning that it could simply prevent the Court from ruling on a given topic, such as abortion or climate change.
Progressives frame this claim in small-d democratic terms, framing the Supreme Court and the electoral college as institutions designed to rob majorities of the ability to govern. “As recent events have made clear, powerful reactionaries are waging a successful war against American democracy using the countermajoritarian institutions of the American political system,” the liberal columnist Jamele Bouie wrote in The New York Times last year. But “the Constitution gives our elected officials the power to restrain a lawless Supreme Court,” he added, even if it might “spark a constitutional crisis over the power and authority of Congress.”
Conservatives have noticed this push. Last week, Justice Samuel Alito argued that Congress has no ability whatsoever to set limits on the Court’s behavior. “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” Alito told The Wall Street Journal. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
Although Alito is speaking in broader terms, his enmity gets at the simmering Constitutional dilemma at the heart of Klein, the precedent that environmentalists are citing to try to block the Mountain Valley Pipeline. When Congress approved the pipeline earlier this year, was it expressing a democratic view that must be respected by the court system (even if climate activists don’t like it)? Or was Congress instead running roughshod over due process and violating the separation of powers?
These are not academic questions. Although Congress intervened to approve a fossil-fuel pipeline this year, it could just as easily intervene to approve clean-energy infrastructure in the future. Across the country, renewable projects and long-distance electricity transmission have been slowed down by environmental lawsuits and permitting fights; even the Sierra Club has recognized the “NIMBY threat to renewable energy.” If lawsuits were to imperil, say, a major offshore wind project, should a Democratic Congress resolve that fight by granting permit approvals by fiat — or should environmentalists reject that intervention, too, as illegitimate? Under the logic of the anti-pipeline lawsuit, granting permit approvals to any stalled energy project — whether fossil or clean — would violate Klein.
These questions matter because there is no near-term political situation in which Congress and the Supreme Court will only do good things for the climate and not bad things. But there is no way to judge them without making a political assessment: Is Congress likely to expedite a renewable project? Given Democrats’ zeal for tackling climate change, such a thing doesn’t seem ludicrous to me. But if environmentalists had won their case against the pipeline, then lawmakers’ hands would be tied in the future: They could not approve a wind farm, solar plant, or nuclear reactor in the same way that they tried to rubber-stamp the MVP. They would have to wait, instead, for the legal process to run its course.
We should be clear, here, that just because the Sierra Club and others pursued a conservative line of argument in this case does not mean that they are themselves reactionary. Their job — unlike that of politicians or pundits — is to win lawsuits. They have to fight on the terrain that politics has given them, and since that terrain tilts to the right today, they are sometimes going to advance right-leaning arguments.
But the broader environmental movement, which emerged in the 1950s and '60s as a cross-partisan, mass democratic campaign, should be careful not to confuse its goals with those of the elite legal movement. The question hangs over climate policy, permitting reform, and the entire challenge of decarbonization: How should climate advocates balance the goals of decarbonization and democracy? What does democracy even mean for the environment, a term that encompasses the water quality of a stream and the carbon intensity of the atmosphere? In the 21st century, how should Americans exert their will to reshape the land, protect the environment, and power their society?
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Riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area are staring down budget crises, with deep service cuts not far behind.
Three of the country’s largest public transportation systems are facing severe budget shortfalls that have left them near a breaking point. Transit riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area of California could see severe service cuts as soon as next year if their representatives don’t secure funding to fill significant gaps in their operations budgets, the result of dwindling ridership and federal aid.
Should these lawmakers fail or fall short, they could kick off what transit advocates refer to as a “death spiral,” where higher fares and worse service leads to lower ridership, which leads to more cuts, etc., until there’s effectively no service left.
“I think that in a lot of cases, the public, legislators, governors are maybe not aware of just how high the stakes are right now,” David Weiskopf, the senior policy director for Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that helps to elect climate-minded politicians, told me.
Public transit is a uniquely tricky, political issue, as it requires convincing elected officials from across a given state to address an issue that primarily affects people in one concentrated region — even if that region happens to be one of the main economic engines of the entire state economy. And yet transportation is the No. 1 way Americans contribute to climate change. While electric vehicles get a lot more attention as a climate solution, expanding public transit can also reduce emissions with the added benefits of minimizing the raw materials extraction and electricity demand that come along with EVs.
But that’s just a part of what Weiskopf is talking about in terms of the stakes. Millions of people rely on public transit to get themselves to work and their kids to school. Public transit also reduces local air pollution and traffic. Losing the services that already exist would surrender all of those benefits — worsening affordability and quality of life just as they have become top-tier political issues.
There’s a clear chain of events that led so many major transit systems to the brink of collapse this year. In the late 1990s, Congress eliminated federal funding for public transit operations in major cities, instead allocating all of its financial assistance to capital transit projects, such as new or improved infrastructure. Buses and metros began to rely more heavily on revenue from fares to cover operating expenses like staff and fuel. That became disastrous when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and cut ridership dramatically.
Congress passed a series of pandemic relief laws that provided substantial funding for transit operations, keeping them afloat to shuttle essential workers. But that money dried up, and in many places, ridership has remained stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels for reasons including the rise in remote work. Meanwhile, transit systems continued to age, and the cost of labor and materials rose.
State lawmakers have been slow to act, allowing their biggest cities’ transit systems to inch dangerously close to the edge of a fiscal cliff. In Illinois, the legislature has just a few days left in its session to find the money to prevent layoffs and service cuts across Chicago’s three transit systems next year. In California, the state is hammering out a stopgap loan to keep Bay Area operators funded through 2026, while betting the longer-term health of the system on a ballot measure next fall. The split Pennsylvania legislature is at a total impasse on the issue. Governor Josh Shapiro recently authorized transit agencies to dip into their capital budgets to prevent immediate service cuts, but there’s no longer-term solution in sight.
These three states are not entirely unique — almost every public transit system in the country is dealing with the same challenges. But they’re useful case studies to illustrate just how high the stakes are, and what kinds of solutions are on the table.
Prior to the pandemic, two of San Francisco’s regional rail systems — Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, and Cal Train — were covering upwards of 70% of their operating costs with fares, Sebastian Petty, the senior transportation policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, told me. In 2024, however, fare revenue was roughly half of what it was in 2019, covering just under a third of the cost of running the system, with the rest filled in by emergency federal assistance. “There’s no real, obvious path to financial sustainability that doesn't involve some longer source of sustained new public funding,” Petty said.
BART now projects that its COVID relief funding will be gone by spring of next year, after which it will face a deficit of $350 million to $400 million per year. The implications are catastrophic. The fixed costs of operating the system are so high that service cuts alone can’t make up the shortfall. BART estimates that even if it cut service by 90% — including closing at 9 p.m., cutting frequency from every 20 minutes to once an hour, shutting down two full train lines, laying off more than 1,000 workers — that would not be enough to close the gap.
The legislature decided on a regional sales tax as the best way to fund the system, but has left the final say in the matter up to voters. In September, lawmakers passed a bill that authorized a ballot measure in five Bay Area counties next year. Voters will be asked to approve a sales tax increase of half a cent — or a full cent, in the case of San Francisco — for a period of 14 years.
Regardless of whether the ballot measure is successful, however, the transit system still faces a fiscal cliff next year without some kind of bridge funding. A separate bill requires the state Department of Finance to propose a solution for short-term financial assistance for Bay Area transit agencies to bridge the roughly $750 million budget gap for the next year to prevent immediate service cuts. The department has a deadline of January 10, after which the legislature will have to vote on the proposal.
“To be frank, this is not a great position to be in,” Petty said. “People are really, really worried.” But he said this still seems like the best path forward given how large the scale of money needed is. “I say this as someone who’s worked in transit for a while,” Petty told me. “Transit seems to be in some degree of perpetual funding challenge, but this one really is different.”
Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority, which governs the area’s three transit companies, says that it faces a $230 million budget shortfall next year, which could increase nearly fourfold in 2027 without new funding. The agency has warned that it will begin cutting paratransit service for people with disabilities as soon as April, which will expand to main line service and layoffs over the summer if the legislature can’t agree on a new revenue source this month.
Amy Rynell, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit, told me the uncertainty alone has hurt the transit operators’ ability to plan. “The agencies are having to spend a lot of time putting forth multiple budgets to figure out what to do in this moment,” she said. “That’s detracting from the ability to build for the future and develop new projects. People are having to look at keeping the doors open versus making transit better.”
Lawmakers in Illinois spent much of the first half of the year trying to nail down a deal, but they prioritized working on reforms to the regional transit system before figuring out how to fund it. On May 31, during the final hours of the regular legislative session, the state Senate passed a bill that would create several revenue raisers for public transit, such as a statewide $1.50 “Climate Impact Fee” on retail deliveries, a statewide electric vehicle charging fee, a real estate transfer tax, and a tax on rideshare services like Uber and Lyft. But lawmakers in the House claimed they didn’t have enough time to review the implications of such measures. An earlier idea to increase tolls died in the face of opposition from lawmakers representing the suburbs as well as labor groups.
The legislature has just three days left — October 28 through 30 — in a special veto session to reach an agreement on transit funding. Rynell was optimistic that it would get there. “It remains a priority of the House, Senate, and governor’s team,” she said. “People have put a lot of time and effort into getting a good package because the legislative leaders don’t want to be back in the same place in five or 10 years.”
For two years in a row, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, has narrowly avoided a fiscal crisis with stopgap solutions from the governor’s office after the legislature failed to secure any transit funding. In November 2024, Governor Shapiro got approval from the Biden administration to transfer $153 million in federal capital highway funds to SEPTA, preventing immediate service cuts and postponing a 21% fare hike. But the agency still anticipated a $213 million gap, and said it would have to implement both the rate hike and service cuts this fall unless it secured additional funding.
The funding never came. The Pennsylvania legislature, paralyzed by a one-seat Democratic majority in the House and a Republican Senate, let a June 30 state budget deadline come and go. “Five of these funding bills, sort of different permutations, passed the State House that would have given sustainable revenue for transit,” Stephen Bronskill, the coalition manager at Transit Forward Philadelphia, told me. “All these bills were bipartisan. They failed in the State Senate.”
Weeks of uncertainty and chaos followed. In late August, SEPTA followed through with raising fares and began cutting service. Just two weeks later, however, a court sided with consumer rights advocates who argued that the cuts disproportionately impacted people of color and low-income riders, and ordered SEPTA to restore service.
During those two weeks, residents got a taste of what the future could hold: workers late to work, students late to class, overcrowded buses and trolleys, confusion about which routes were still operating. After the court order, SEPTA turned to a desperate measure — a request to use up to $394 million of state funds designated for capital expenditures on its operations, instead. The move would preserve full service for two years, but at the expense of infrastructure repairs and upgrades. Governor Shapiro approved the request.
“It’s a Band-Aid solution, and no new money for transit has been allocated,” Bronskill said. It’s also a particularly terrible time to deplete SEPTA’s capital budget, as its aging railcars are becoming dangerous to operate. There have been five fires on SEPTA railcars in 2025 alone. A recent report from the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Authority’s 1970s-era “silverliner” cars, which make up about 60% of the fleet, predate federal fire safety hazards and require either extensive retrofits or replacement.
The money will also only benefit transit systems in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Bronskill noted. “Every other transit agency across the state faces the same cliff of having to cut service in the face of the deficits. So we are continuing this fight.”
Pennsylvania lawmakers have proposed some of the same ideas that have been floated in Illinois to raise money for transit. They’ve also considered a car rental and lease tax, diverting funding from the state sales tax, taxing so-called “skill games” common at bars and convenience stores, and legalizing recreational marijuana.
To Justin Balik, the state program director for the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, the challenge is not so much about coming up with revenue options as mustering “political will and urgency and prioritization.”
But more than anything, Pennsylvania suffers partisan politics and total paralysis due to its split legislature, which is now more than 100 days past the deadline to set even a basic state budget for next year. “I think once that is done, we all have our work cut out for us to tell the story in a compelling way of why the problem isn't solved and why we need faster action on this,” Balik said.
Evergreen is part of a new coalition of environmental and transit advocacy groups and think tanks called the Clean RIDES Network, which stands for Responsible Investments to Decrease Emissions in States, that’s trying to engender the political will for and prioritization of clean transportation solutions in statehouses around the country. The group is advocating for “a more holistic plan for transportation advocacy” that brings together ideas like avoiding highway expansions, improving transit access and efficiencies, and investing in vehicle electrification. Over 100 organizations are involved, including national groups like RMI, Sierra Club, and the NRDC, as well as state advocacy outfits like the Clean Air Council in Pennsylvania and Active Transportation Alliance in Illinois.
Advocates like Balik and Weiskopf, of Climate Cabinet, argued that it’s the right time to put transportation at the front and center of the climate fight. While there’s little state leaders can do to counter President Trump’s actions to weaken U.S. climate policy, public transit is one of the few areas they control. “This is a place that all of these lawmakers have the opportunity to do something meaningful and effective,” Weiskopf said, “even if it is just to prevent another thing from becoming much worse.”
On Detroit layoffs, critical mineral woes, and China hawks vs. cheap energy
Current conditions: Two tropical waves are moving westward across the Atlantic, with atmospheric conditions primed to develop into a storm in the Caribbean • Douala, Cameroon’s largest city and economic capital, notched its highest October temperature since records began in the 1800s, at nearly 95 degrees Fahrenheit • In Spain, average temperatures have eclipsed 86 degrees every day of this month so far.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Alex Wong/Getty Images
On Friday afternoon, Politico published an explosive story suggesting that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright had strained his relationship with President Donald Trump by taking too deliberative an approach and consulting industry before slashing clean energy programs. The report, based on conversations with 10 anonymous sources, teased the possibility that Wright could end up departing the agency. “It just seems so messy right now,” one of the sources said in reference to the relationship. “I don’t know how much longer he’s got.” The frustration, the story indicated, was mutual. The former chief executive of the fracking giant Liberty Energy, Wright reportedly “has been dissatisfied for some time with taking direction from the White House and the strictures of government after years of running his own company,” a dynamic that mirrors issues former Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Rex Tillerson faced as Secretary of State in Trump’s first administration.
When I reached out to an insider with knowledge of the agency, the source told me the story was months behind and no longer reflected the current relationship between Wright and the White House. Other Republicans certainly don’t see Wright’s approach to cutting clean energy programs as too cautious. In an interview with another Politico reporter, Josh Siegel, Utah Senator John Curtis said Wright “does have concerns about too many renewables going onto the market. I don’t. With time my approach has proven right and it will again, in that the government needs to play a productive role in providing affordable, reliable, clean energy.” Meanwhile, more than a third of Americans say their electricity bills are a “major” source of stress, according to a new Associated Press poll.
The Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation last week rescinded a policy requiring the nation’s biggest banks and lenders to factor risks from climate change into longterm planning, The New York Times reported Friday. The Federal Reserve Board staff had called the Biden-era policy “distracting” and “not necessary,” and regulators now said the existing rules that banks “consider and appropriately address all material financial risks” were enough. Critics said the rule change was a cynical ploy to boost fossil fuel production and blamed the FDIC board, whose appointees include White House budget director Russell Vought, for putting the U.S. economy at risk of higher costs as warming worsens.
Auto parts manufacturer Dana Incorporated laid off more than 100 employees from its electric vehicle battery factory in Auburn Hills, Michigan, last week, as the Trump administration’s funding cuts begin to take effect in the broader economy. The pink slips came abruptly. “It’s hard. It’s hard. I’m a single mom of four. So this unexpected layoff is even harder,” one worker, Kassandra Pojok, told the local broadcaster Fox 2. “There are a lot of single parents, a lot of people who are wondering, ‘How are we going to pay our rent?’ We have one check, not even a full check left. We were told not to work our last day.”
The job cuts come in the wake of the Heatmap’s Jeva Lange called “a multi-front blitz on EVs.” The president’s landmark tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, terminated the country’s main federal tax credit for electric vehicles last month. The dramatically shortened deadline led to a surge in EV purchases in the last three months before the tax credit disappeared. “This decision is the result of the unexpected and immediate reduction in customer orders driven by lower demand for electric vehicles, which has rendered continued operations at the plant no longer viable,” Dana Incorporated said in a statement. The factory closure marked “the third time in two months that clean energy manufacturing jobs in Michigan have been put on hold or canceled,” according to the advocacy group Climate Power.
As regular readers of this newsletter know, China is ratcheting up export restrictions on critical minerals such as rare earths. On Friday, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that minerals are “America’s most dangerous dependence.” In a blog post on the influential think tank’s website, Michael Froman warned that China could restrict global access to critical mineral products, including rare earth magnets, and bring much economic activity to a screeching halt.” As the most recent export controls show, “China is willing and able to exploit this strategic vulnerability,” he wrote. “It has already proven its willingness to use export controls as a tool of economic coercion.”
To accelerate domestic production in the U.S., the Trump administration has taken ownership stakes in mining projects, speeded up permitting, and started stockpiling minerals for the military. By gutting the electric vehicle tax credit, however, the administration eliminated one of the most significant sources of demand for mineral production, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote earlier this year, calling it the “paradox” of Trump’s mining policy. As I reported on Friday for Heatmap, overseas mining projects in developing countries don’t always work out; just look at what chaos the coup of Madagascar has created for Denver-based Energy Fuels’ mine in the African nation. But the U.S. can’t go it alone on metals. “While it might be important for the United States to develop some production capacity here at home, it doesn’t have to play catch up entirely on its own,” Froman wrote. “It should work with allies and partners to bring mining and production facilities online more quickly.”
The West can’t lower its energy costs without working with Chinese companies, according to an executive from one of China’s biggest wind turbine manufacturers. While Kai Wu, the vice president of Goldwind, said it was “fully understandable” that foreign governments want to strengthen local supply chains, China’s cost advantage in turbine manufacturing had grown “huge,” at about “40%, at least” compared to Western rivals, he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I always ask them: are you ready to sacrifice the cost of energy? Everybody wants to have the best salary and the lowest workload, but it’s not reality.”
The provocative statements came as fellow Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced plans for a factory in Scotland as part of a push into Europe. It’s coming as China’s own market matures. As I reported in this newsletter in July, Chinese solar installations plunged 85% when the country removed incentives for more panel deployments. With the rate of deployment decreasing, Chinese manufacturers are looking overseas for new markets, as Matthew reported last week. In spite of these trends, China’s power production from coal and gas dropped 5% in September, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air’s Lauri Myllivirta, contributing to a 1.2% drop for the first nine months of the year.
Sixty years after the Thames was declared biologically dead due to years of pollution, the Zoological Society of London has found that the river is revived. Hundreds of wildlife species have returned to London’s central waterway, including seahorses, eels, seals, and shark species with charmingly English names like tope, starry smooth hound, and spurdog sharks.
The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.