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“On a more level playing field, clean energy will prove its superiority.”

Many climate advocates are revolting against Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting deal over its oil and gas industry giveaways. But not all of them. Among the climate wonk set, there’s a growing chorus that supports the bill and says the fossil fuel language is a pill worth swallowing.
The almost-retired West Virginia senator’s bill — which was voted out of committee yesterday with a bipartisan 15-4 vote — would grease the skids for approving new transmission and renewables projects in plenty of ways. It would also strengthen fossil fuel leasing mandates and, in the activists’ view, hinder efforts to wind down permitting for liquified natural gas export terminals.
Little analysis of this specific bill’s climate impacts has been made public, and any modeling would be highly variable. Yet clearly lawmakers have seen at least some research: During the hearing on the permitting bill, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich claimed the oil and gas provisions would “likely increase emissions on a scale of less than” 160 million tons of CO2, while other parts of the bill would reduce emissions by 2 to 3 billion tons of CO2, he said.
Academics and consultants I spoke with agree with Heinrich’s take: The positive climate impacts of the pieces hastening permits crucial to the energy transition may easily outweigh the carbon dioxide and methane emissions impacts of the fossil fuel language. As I began to unpack the various points of view and the disparity between climate wonks and the many activists opposed to the bill, it became clear to me that the fissures between these two camps speak to a broad challenge facing the energy transition. Bipartisan compromise on climate change through the U.S. government’s system almost by necessity requires capitulation to fossil fuels, which violates the principles of many grassroots activists.
“Truth is, the U.S. is not ready to talk about seriously scaling down oil and gas production,” Noah Gordon, acting co-director for sustainability, climate, and geopolitics at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, told me via email. (Gordon said he “supports the bill despite reservations.”)
“The only way to make that conversation possible is to massively boost clean energy and change the balance of political power,” Gordon said. “In 2024, this is feasible only through all-energy-is-welcome bills like Manchin-Barrasso. On a more level playing field, clean energy will prove its superiority.”
Take the language on LNG. Yes, it would alter the course of an effort led by youth climate campaigners under the Biden administration to curtail approvals for pending LNG export terminals, which could have clear downsides for the communities surrounding these projects. But on a global scale, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has written, the climate impacts of American LNG really depend on where it’s going and what it’s used for. To make matters slightly more opaque, some environmentalists who claim the climate impacts of LNG exports would be catastrophic are referencing science that has yet to be peer-reviewed and is still disputed, as Zeitlin noted.
Or take the bill’s language on coal. If enacted, the legislation would require the government to adhere to strict deadlines on processing applications to lease coal — but it wouldn’t force the government to decide one way or the other on those applications. According to Jenny Harbine, an attorney for Earthjustice (which is opposed to the permitting bill), this language would not impact the Biden administration’s efforts to wind down coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, the nation’s most active coal mining region.
“This bill doesn’t appear to change that decision,” Harbine told me yesterday. “It appears to leave largely discretion in the hands of the Secretary to not lease.”
All of this is not to say that the climate wonks who support the bill enjoy the fossil fuel language — they’re quite sympathetic to the opposition’s rationale. But they also don’t think it’ll be the end of the world; meanwhile, the current permitting regime is just not cutting it. Sources pointed me to a study from the consultancy Evolved Energy Research, which found that about half the potential emissions reductions from the Inflation Reduction Act are essentially dependent on faster deployment and siting of renewables and interregional transmission.
“In terms of overall leverage on climate, the growth of domestic clean sources enabled by transmission really outweighs everything else,” Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies LLC, told me. “All of it is additional, whereas the fossil supply here is displacing fossil supply elsewhere, so a one-for-one deal … is a net carbon benefit because of that dynamic.”
Princeton professor and energy systems expert Jesse Jenkins (who is also a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast) told me the same. Curbing oil and gas leasing on federal land would also not necessarily lower supply, as such drilling may just move to non-federal lands or other countries. Without addressing demand, there’s always the risk that leasing restrictions fail to substantially lower CO2 emissions. Jenkins nodded to a Resources for the Future study that quantified emissions from oil and gas leasing and found even a ban on new oil and gas leasing “would not on its own achieve net-zero emissions from oil and gas on federal lands by 2040,” stating much more action would be necessary — such as carbon sequestration, modifications to existing leases, and other measures.
“We can’t choke off the world’s supply for fossil fuels, but we can beat it with cheaper, better clean energy technologies,” he said.
Ultimately, the Manchin permitting deal — which may or may not become law any time soon — could reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over time, if the studies and charts are to be believed. That would be a great thing for the planet. But that’s not really why so many climate activists are against the bill. These people see the end of the petroleum sector as the paramount goal and refuse to settle for legislation that enshrines future fossil fuel production into law, even if the benefits to renewable energy deployment may be greater.
There are key differences between the kind of deal renewable energy developers and decarbonization-focused academics would enjoy and legislation that activists will accept, Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst with the think tank Frontier Group, explained to me. Dutzik told me he works with environmental non-profits who are against the bill. “I’ve known so many people over the years, and the thing they wanted to do is to be on the front end of the clean energy transition, and dedicate their lives to that for very good reasons … But if you are a trade group or developer that is working on clean energy, that piece of the puzzle is your focus.”
Dutzik compared the IRA and the permitting legislation to longstanding environmental statutes like the Clean Air Act, which acted as a boundary on the market to reduce pollution. “Capitalism mobilizes an incredible amount of resources and can move incredibly quickly when it is given the incentives to do so,” he said, “but the thing that it hasn’t done is to set that boundary or that standard.”
It’s clear to me from my conversations with climate activists that there’s a lingering frustration about the American pro-market approach to climate. The IRA, for example, did very little to penalize fossil fuel production or greenhouse gas emissions at all — it took an all-carrot, no-stick approach to industrial policy. Something resembling a carbon tax is nowhere close to happening, unless you count the nascent bid to enact a carbon border adjustment mechanism. And regulatory efforts to clamp down on greenhouse gasses are getting stymied by courts.
“Essentially, what you wind up with — and this will be the core of the disagreement,” Dutzik said, “is you wind up with more of everything. And if you wind up with more of everything, that may get you more clean energy, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the climate problem, and it certainly doesn’t solve the problems that are experienced by people who live near fossil fuel production, transportation and consumption. And it doesn’t necessarily get at the relationship between fossil fuels and the natural world.”
Jenkins noted similar divisions occurred with the IRA, which had its own capitulations to fossil fuel.
“There’s a chunk of the climate campaigning groups [who believes] we win by raising the cost of permitting and transactions, and legal suits, and choking off supplies of fossil fuels. There’s another group of people — the people who helped get the IRA passed — who believe we win by displacing fossil fuels.”
In Jenkins’ view, the old way of curtailing fossil energy by choking off supplies may not really apply to a post-IRA world. Before the IRA, it made more sense to invest in “dirty energy” than clean energy, when now “the opposite is true.” This “tips the calculus of how you view this process from a climate perspective.” And it may be better to compromise and quicken new renewable energy deployment in the hopes it further diminishes interest in fossil fuel leasing.
“This is at the heart of it. I don’t think there’s any way we can create a legal regime that doesn’t apply something like parity across [all] different kinds of energy infrastructure,” Jenkins said. “You’re not going to get that in a bipartisan bill.”
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“I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate.”
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s most important funders of climate-related causes, has a new message: Lighten up on the “doomsday.”
In a new memo, called “Three tough truths about climate,” Gates calls for a “strategic pivot.” Climate-concerned philanthropy should focus on global health and poverty, he says, which will still cause more human suffering than global warming.
“I’m not saying we should ignore temperature-related deaths because diseases are a bigger problem,” he writes. “What I am saying is that we should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause, and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health so that extreme weather isn’t such a threat to them.”
This new focus didn’t come with a change in funding priorities — but that’s partly because some big shake-ups have already happened. In February, Heatmap reported that Breakthrough Energy, Gates’ climate-focused funding group, had slashed its grant-making budget. Gates later closed Breakthrough’s policy and advocacy office altogether.
Despite eliminating those financial commitments, he still dwells on two of his longtime obsessions in the new memo: cutting the “green premium” for energy technologies, meaning the delta between the cost of carbon-emitting and clean energy technologies, and improving the measurement of how spending can do the most for human welfare. The same topics dominated his thinking when I last spoke to the billionaire at the 2023 United Nations climate conference in Dubai.
What seems to have shifted, instead, is the global political environment. The Trump administration and Elon Musk gutted the federal government’s spending on global public health causes, such as vaccines and malaria prevention. European countries have also cut back their global aid spending, although not as dramatically as the U.S.
Gates seemingly now feels called to their defense: “Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent,” he writes, praising the vaccine alliance Gavi in particular. “Energy innovation is a good buy not because it saves lives now, but because it will provide cheap clean energy and eventually lower emissions, which will have large benefits for human welfare in the future.”
Last week, Gates shared his thinking about climate change at a roundtable with a handful of reporters. He was, as always, engaging. I’ve shared some of his new takes on climate policy below. His quotes have been edited for clarity.
The environment we’re in today, the policies for climate change are less accommodating. It’s hard to name a country where you’d say, Oh, the climate policies are more accommodating today than they have been in the past.
The thesis I had was that middle income countries — who were already, at that time, the majority of all emissions — would never pay a premium for greenness. And so you could say, well, maybe the rich countries should subsidize that. But you know, the amounts involved would get you up to, like, 4% of rich country budgets would have to be transferred to do that. And we’re at 1% and going down. And there are some other worthy things that that money goes for, other than subsidizing positive green premium type approaches. So the thesis in the book [How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021] is we had to innovate our way to negative green premiums for the middle income countries.
Climate [change] is an evil thing in that it’s caused by rich countries and high middle-income countries and the primary burden [falls on poor countries]. When I looked into climate activists, I said, Well, this is incredible. They care about poor countries so much. That’s wonderful, that they feel guilty about it. But in fact, a lot of climate activists, they have such an extreme view of what’s going to happen in rich countries — their climate activism is not because they care about poor farmers and Africa, it’s because they have some purported view that, like, New York City, can’t deal with the flooding or the heat.
The other challenge we have in the climate movement is in order to have some degree of accountability, it was very focused on short-term goals and per-country reports. And the per-country reporting thing is, in a way, a good thing, because a country — certainly when it comes to deforestation or what it’s doing on its electric grid, there is sovereign accountability for what’s being done. But I mean, the way everybody makes steel is the same. The way everybody makes the cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same. And so there can’t be some wonderful surprise, where some country comes in and, you know, gives you this little number [for its Paris Agreement goals], and you go, Wow, good! You’re so tough, you’re so good, you’re so amazing. Because other than deforestation and your particular electric grid, these are all global things.
If you’re a rich country, the costs of adaptation are just one of many, many things that are not gigantic, huge percentages of GDP — you know, rebuilding L.A. so that it’s like the Getty Museum, in terms of there’s no brush that can catch on fire, there’s no roof that can catch on fire, adds about 10% cost to the rebuild. It’s not like, Oh my god, we can’t live in LA. There’s no apocalyptic story for rich countries. [Climate adaptation] is one of many things that you should pay attention to, like, Does your health system work? Does your education system work? Does your political system work? There are a variety of things that are also quite important.
The place where it gets really tough is in these poor countries. But you know, what is the greatest tool for climate adaptation? Getting rich — growing your economy is the biggest single thing, living in conditions where you don’t face big climate problems. So when you say to an African country, Hey, you have a natural gas deposit, and we’re going to try to block you from getting financing for using that natural gas deposit … It probably won’t work, because there’s a lot of money in the world. It’s not clear how you’d achieve that. And it’s also in terms of the warming effect of that natural gas, versus the improvement of the conditions of the people in that country — it’s not even a close thing.
People in the [climate] movement, we do have to say to ourselves, For the Europeans, how much were they willing to pay in order to support climate? — and did we overestimate in terms of forcing them to switch to electric cars, to buy electric heat pumps, to have their price of electricity be higher? Did we overestimate their willingness to pay with some of those policies? And you do have to be careful because if your climate policies are too aggressive, you will be unelected, and you’ll have a right-wing government that cares not a bit about climate. I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate. You worry they care so much about it that the people you talk to, you won’t be able to meet with them again, because they won’t be in power.
On EV investments hitting the brakes, Google’s nuclear restart, and a new data center consensus
Current conditions: Cyclone Montha is poised to make landfall over the Andhra Pradesh coast in eastern India with winds of up to 62 miles per hour • South Africa’s Northern Cape faces extremely high fire risks • Southwest California is also facing high risk of wildfires amid Santa Ana winds and dry, warm conditions today and tomorrow.

Hurricane Melissa has strengthened into a major storm, threatening to make landfall over Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba as a Category 5 hurricane in the next few hours, with winds up to 180 miles per hour and more than four feet of rainfall. It’s likely to be the strongest storm to hit Jamaica since records started in 1851, with storm surge lapping the coast with waves of up to 15 feet. Already the storm has killed at least six people in the northern Caribbean. Evacuations started on Monday. “This can quickly escalate into a humanitarian crisis where a large number of people are in need of basic supplies such as food, safe drinking water, housing and medical care,” AccuWeather forecasters warned on Monday. “The prolonged nature of impacts can result in entire communities being cut off from aid and support for multiple days.”
The U.S. is just weeks away from reviving a shuttered nuclear plant for the first time, as Holtec International’s Palisades plant in Michigan nears its restart. Once that’s done, the Microsoft-backed project to revive the still-operable reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility is likely the next nuclear site to come back from permanent decommissioning. Add another to the list. On Monday, Google inked a deal to back the restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, Iowa’s only atomic power station. As I reported in this newsletter back in August, NextEra was already considering a restart of the station, which shut down in 2020. It is, as my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in August, the zenith of the "nuclear dealmaking boom.”
The move comes as the U.S. finally embraces large-scale reactors again after years of pegging all future hopes of new nuclear construction on as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors. On Tuesday, the U.S. government announced an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to build a fleet of at least eight new power plants with a mix of gigawatt-sized AP1000s and some smaller versions, the Financial Times reported.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has breaking news on New York’s energy future: Swiftsure, a 650-megawatt battery energy storage development planned for New York’s Staten Island, was quietly scuttled in August. Rather than make a public announcement, the developer, Fullmark Energy (formerly Hecate), instead wrote a letter to the New York State Department of Public Service withdrawing the proposal. As Jael wrote, “nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.” The project faced heavy opposition, including from New York Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. The campaigns of Democrat Zohran Mamdani and independent Andrew Cuomo did not respond to requests for comment.
In other local news, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange is out with a remarkable new series called The Aftermath, a look at surviving the infernos that are increasingly a fact of life in parts of the U.S., especially out West. The series includes stories on the challenges involved in evacuation, why relocation can be impossible, the stories of wildfires that don’t capture national attention, the limits of what the public knows and doesn’t know about wildfires, and the buffers towns such as the fire-scorched Paradise, California, are trying to establish.
Investments in electric vehicle-related infrastructure, including batteries factories, vehicle assembly plants, and charging stations, tumbled by nearly a third to $8.1 billion in the three months leading to September compared to the same period a year earlier, according to the Financial Times. The analysis, based on data from the U.S. Clean Investment Monitor, found that about $7 billion of planned EV investments were abandoned between April and September. The pullback could define the West’s place in the EV industry for years to come, widening China’s lead over production of battery-powered cars. “We need to … be quicker in development to compete with the Chinese,” Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars, told the newspaper. “As soon as you weaken these signals, everything will slow down,” he added, referring to the knock-on effect of policy changes emanating from the White House.
When Secretary of Energy Chris Wright last week directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track interconnection request for large new energy users, he also endorsed the somewhat controversial idea that big electricity users such as data centers should dial back their operations from time to time when the grid is stressed, Latitude Media’s Lisa Martine Jenkins reported last week. On Monday, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI threw its weight behind the idea. In a letter to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Christopher Lehane, OpenAI’s chief government affairs officer, called on regulators to “expand use of curtailable load resources and modernize interconnection policy.” Lehane said “we welcomed the news last week that” Wright had expressed support for the policy. “To strengthen grid reliability and expand capacity for AI and other flexible loads, FERC should allow more demand-side participation in wholesale markets and speed up interconnection for large loads that can curtail,” he added.
The idea has been gaining momentum since Duke Energy researcher Tyler Norris put out a landmark paper in February identifying up to 100 gigawatts of additional load the grid could absorb if data centers simply adopted a policy of reducing power consumption when there was a shortage of electrons. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called it “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
Carbon removal startup Rewind has launched DMS Georgia, the first commercial-scale carbon removal operation using deep mine storage. It’s the first time a certified carbon credit will be delivered by plant-based carbon in naturally oxygen-free underground environments. The project aims to bury carbon-emitting biomass in environments where the lack of oxygen makes decomposition impossible. By 2030, Rewind aims to remove one million metric tons of carbon per year.
Fullmark Energy quietly shuttered Swiftsure, a planned 650-megawatt energy storage system on Staten Island.
The biggest battery project in New York has been canceled in a major victory for the nascent nationwide grassroots movement against energy storage development.
It’s still a mystery why exactly the developer of Staten Island’s Swiftsure project, Fullmark Energy (formerly known as Hecate), pulled the plug. We do know a few key details: First, Fullmark did not announce publicly that it was killing the project, instead quietly submitting a short, one-page withdrawal letter to the New York State Department of Public Service. That letter, which is publicly available, is dated August 18 of this year, meaning that the move formally occurred two months ago. Still, nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.
Second, Swiftsure was going to be massive. It was the largest planned battery storage project in New York State, according to public records, with the ability to store upwards of 650 megawatts of electricity — enough to power more than half a million homes. That makes Swiftsure likely one of the largest battery projects in the country, with more capacity than any other energy storage project currently facing opposition in the U.S., according to our very own Heatmap Pro database. This is the second Fullmark project to totally flop in recent months. We reported last week that one of the company’s projects outside of Los Angeles had its permits voided in a court ruling that also blocked battery storage development in unincorporated areas outside the city.
Third, and potentially most significant for energy developers in New York City: Swiftsure’s death will almost certainly embolden the anti-storage activist movement.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee in next week’s New York mayoral election, was one of many local politicians who opposed Swiftsure and rallied with residents close to the proposed site in May. He’s part of a broader trend of Republican politicians becoming skeptical of battery storage sites near where people live and work, including in Democrat-ruled New York.
Putting batteries in the five boroughs has always been a challenge, but January’s Moss Landing battery fire in California created a PR frenzy in the city, as conservative figures seized on the online panic created by the blaze. Once-agnostic GOP members of Congress from New York City are now anti-battery storage in their backyards, including Anthony D’Esposito, Nicole Malliotakis and Mike Lawler. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin — a former NYC congressman — is now weighing in against individual battery projects on Long Island and Staten Island.
Swiftsure was proposed in 2023 and permitted by the state last year. Fullmark was given a deadline of this spring to submit routine paperwork demonstrating how it would comply with conditions of the site’s permit, including how the battery storage project would be decommissioned. In August, the New York Department of Public Service gave Fullmark an extension until October 11.
Instead of meeting that October deadline, it seems Fullmark quietly withdrew its Swiftsure proposal.
It’s unclear how Democrat Zohran Mamdani or independent Andrew Cuomo would handle the rise of the anti-battery movement if either of them wins the November 4 mayoral election. That’s partially because energy policy and climate change have been non-issues in the campaign, saving small mentions of nuclear power, heat pumps, or gas prices in one-off debate answers or social media posts.
Sliwa, who has referred to Swiftsure as a “mini Chernobyl,” told me that he anticipates this victory will lead to more protests at more battery sites, no matter who wins the mayoral election. “The cancellation of this lithium-ion battery warehouse will reverberate throughout the boroughs,” Sliwa told me Monday. “It’ll be a rallying cry [because] it’s not a fait accompli that these facilities will be complete and operational.”
The Mamdani and Cuomo campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Swiftsure’s cancellation.