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At least for the foreseeable future. But is the Manchin-Barrasso bill actually worth it?
So … is the permitting reform bill any good or not?
Earlier this year, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Barrasso of Wyoming proposed a bill that would change federal environmental rules so as to spur a buildout of new energy infrastructure around the country.
Their proposal would have loosened rules for oil and gas drilling and exporting while changing federal law to encourage the construction of more clean energy.
These renewables-friendly changes included creating a new legal regime that would push utilities and grid operators to build significantly more long-distance power lines, triggering a nationwide boost to renewable resources. They would also have changed the regulations governing geothermal power generation, allowing new enhanced geothermal wells to play by the same federal rules that bind oil and gas.
The legislation was announced in July and then … nothing happened.
Now it seems likely to come back. Congress is eyeing its final agenda items for the year, and permitting reform is one of them. Representative Bruce Westerman, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources, is currently said to be revamping Manchin and Barrasso’s proposal to include reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock law that guides the process — but not the outcome — of virtually every major decision that the federal government makes and requires it to study the environmental impact of its policies.
We don’t know what those changes will look like yet, though they’ll have to come soon — the new Congress gets sworn in in just a few weeks. Which means lawmakers will have to get the proposed changes, process them, and decide whether to vote for them in a very short period of time — just a few days.
So during this liminal period, then, I wanted to take a moment to look at the other parts of the bill. Earlier this year, we got a sense of what the bill’s quantitative effects might be. They suggest that the legislation — at least in the initial version proposed by Manchin and Barrasso — could very well help cut U.S. emissions, or at least leave them flat. But after that? It starts to get complicated.
Republicans have long pushed for changes to the federal government’s permitting regime.
But in recent years, Democrats — who hope to prompt a national surge of clean energy construction — have come aboard too. The Biden administration, frustrated that some parts of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law haven’t resulted in the large-scale projects they hoped for, has come to back permitting reform explicitly, although they have not endorsed Manchin and Barrasso’s bill.
“The president has been clear … that we believe permitting reform should pass on a bipartisan basis — and that we believe permitting needs to be optimized for building out a clean energy economy,” John Podesta, a White House senior advisor who is now the country’s top climate diplomat, said in a speech last year.
The White House’s support of bipartisan permitting reform is more than just posturing: Because of Senate math, any changes to the country’s permitting laws almost certainly must be bipartisan. Until a bare majority of Democratic senators exists to kill the legislative filibuster, it will take a vote of at least 60 senators — a so-called supermajority — to alter most pre-existing federal legislation.
So the question, then, is: Is this attempt at permitting reform worth passing? Is this package of fossil fuel concessions and clean energy incentives likely to reduce emissions more than it increases them?
I won’t try to answer that question comprehensively today, and we can’t even answer it fully until we know the scope of Westerman’s changes. But I do want to share an analysis from the center-left think tank Third Way and other researchers that suggests that the answer is “yes.”
This analysis, released in September, argues that Manchin and Barrasso’s bill would modestly increase emissions by encouraging more oil and gas drilling on federal lands. But that increase would likely be dwarfed by a large decrease in emissions prompted by building out the country’s electricity transmission grid.
More specifically, it finds that while the pro-fossil fuel provisions could raise global climate pollution by as much as 6.1 billion metric tons by 2050, the bill’s support for transmission could cut emissions by as much as 15.7 billion metric tons in that time (although the final number, as you’ll see, is a very high end estimate). That’s because, as I’ve written before, building the grid will allow for more renewable, geothermal, and other forms of zero-carbon electricity generation to get built. And the country can only reduce emissions by building more zero-carbon electricity.
Some of those emissions increases from oil and gas are now likely to occur whether or not the bill passes — the Trump administration will encourage fossil fuel extraction and export far beyond what a Harris administration would have done.
But even in a more conservative scenario, the transmission provisions would still cut emissions by 6.5 billion metric tons by 2050, Third Way’s synthesis says. That would mean — when compared to the pro-fossil policies — that the bill has a much more modest effect overall, cutting emissions by just over 400 million tons through 2050.
These aren’t the only numbers out there. An analysis by Jeremy Symons, the former vice president of public affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund, argues that the bill’s loosening of some Biden-era restrictions on liquified natural gas export terminals will result in a tremendous LNG boom. He asserts that the bill’s LNG provisions could increase global emissions by 8.5 to 11 gigatons; his analysis, however, draws heavily from a controversial, initially erroneous, and now updated study from the Cornell ecologist Robert Howarth that contends American natural gas is far worse for the climate than coal.
Third Way did not include Symons’ study in its analysis. Instead, it cites a different study led by the Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins (with whom I cohost Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast) that uses natural-gas emissions estimates more in line with the broader scholarly literature. That modeling study indicates that the LNG provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso bill could increase emissions by as much as 3.3 gigatons — or decrease them by 2.4 gigatons.
I’m not going to get more into the LNG question in this story. And it’s somewhat less important than it was earlier this year because Trump administration is likely to approve as many LNG export terminals as it can. (That doesn’t mean those terminals will get built: Right now, a dozen LNG terminals have been approved but not built due to a lack of global demand for more LNG.) Instead, I want to dive into two specific provisions in the bill — on oil and gas leasing and transmission — that reveal the broader challenges of trying to speak concretely about this proposal.
By far the most climate-friendly provisions in EPRA concern its support of long-distance electricity transmission. As I’ve covered before, the lack of electricity transmission is now one of the biggest barriers to building new wind, solar, and other clean energy in the United States; the construction of new wind farms, in particular, seems to be slowing down because of a lack of available power lines to carry their electrons.
Manchin and Barrasso’s proposal aims to build more transmission largely by granting new powers to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that oversees the country’s power grids. EPRA would, for instance, allow FERC to step in and approve transmission lines that are “in the national interest” if a state has not acted on a given project within a year. The law also clarifies who should pay for a new power line, encoding the idea that customers who benefit from a line should pay for it. And it lets FERC approve payments from developers to the communities where new transmission infrastructure gets built, potentially smoothing approvals at the local level.
The bill also instructs FERC to write a rule that will require each part of the country to build a minimal amount of power lines that allow regions to exchange power with their neighbors. This measure — meant to spur new “interregional” transmission infrastructure — aims to knit the national grid more closely together and lower power costs on average.
How much would these policies reduce national emissions? The truth is, that’s extremely difficult to model. “There’s nothing in the EPRA that says, Thou shalt build this much transmission,” Charles Teplin, a grid expert at the think tank RMI, told me.
Instead, the bill aims to kick off a process that will result in more transmission getting built. That transmission should — in theory — bring more renewables online. But what will the size of that buildout be, and how many emissions will those renewables displace?
Answering these questions requires, again, estimating the uncertain. To come up with a reasonable, conservative figure to represent the amount of regional transmission that might get built under the new FERC process, they looked at what happened when a similar process was overseen by the Midwest’s grid. Then they rounded down that figure significantly.
Teplin and his colleagues also assumed that some big power lines that have already been proposed nationwide — roughly 15 gigawatts, to be exact — will get completed faster because of these new laws, so their analysis starts to bring them online by 2029. One only need look at the nearly two-decade saga of SunZia, a large power line that crosses New Mexico and Arizona, to see how long it can take to finish those projects today.
Under those assumptions, the law should more than double the rate of America’s transmission buildout, Teplin and his team estimated. Right now, the country builds perhaps 1 gigawatt of new transmission lines every year; under their assumptions, that would leap to 2 to 4 gigawatts a year.
So how many emissions would these new lines avoid? Using a report published by Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm that advocates for more transmission, Teplin and his colleagues estimate that each “gigawatt-mile” of new transmission will let operators add about 32 gigawatts of solar and wind to the grid each year. (This suggests that, most of the time, the lines would run at about 30% of capacity.)
Finally, the team assumed that electricity from these new renewable projects will replace power from natural gas plants. That, too, is an approximation: Some of those new wind and solar farms will drive out coal plants; others might replace non-emitting resources like nuclear or hydroelectric dams; but in general they will reduce gas burning.
When you put all those figures together, RMI’s analysis suggests that the legislation could build roughly twice as much new clean energy generation by 2050 as exists in all fossil-fuel power plants today. These new resources would help avoid about 6.5 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century.
That may seem like a big number — but Third Way was actually able to reach an even larger estimate. Teplin and his team didn’t try to differentiate, for instance, between the effects of a recent FERC order, which requires utilities to build more transmission within regions, and the proposed Manchin-Barrasso bill, which shores up the legality of that FERC order and would also induce utilities to build more power lines between regions. Some legal experts argue that the recent FERC order will be on shaky ground if the Manchin-Barrasso bill doesn’t pass; others say it’s stable enough as-is.
If you assume that courts will kill the FERC order unless Congress acts, then that should raise your estimate of what Manchin-Barrasso might do. That’s essentially what Third Way did — by giving the bill more credit for the resulting regional transmission buildout, they say that its carbon upside could be as large as 15.7 gigatons over the next 25 years. I’m not sure I would be that aggressive, but I think the transmission provisions would likely initiate a big buildout of renewables.
The Manchin-Barrasso bill contains a number of provisions that aim to increase the leasing of federal land for oil and gas drilling. One set requires that the Interior Department must offer a minimum amount of acres every year for oil and gas leasing. It also says that the land offered must be land that oil and gas companies actually want to lease.
This would address one of Republicans’ biggest objections to how the Biden administration has handled oil and gas extraction on federally owned land. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Manchin required that the government offer a minimum amount of oil and gas acreage for every acre of public land it leased to wind and solar developers. But Republicans have accused the Biden administration of getting around this rule by, in essence, offering useless or otherwise undesirable land.
(This concession, I should add, is now essentially moot until 2029, as the Trump administration will hasten to nominate the parcels that oil and gas companies are most excited to drill on. But it could bind a future Democratic administration, requiring them to offer good parcels for oil and gas leasing at the same time that they offer federal land for renewable development.)
The bill would also change some of the rules around the drilling allowed on the borders of federally owned land. Under the Manchin-Barrasso bill, companies could drill a vertical well on privately owned land, then extend it horizontally underground into federal land to extract oil or gas.
These provisions, too, are difficult to model. Much like the transmission proposal, they won’t lead to a guaranteed amount of drilling (although they will essentially produce a minimumamount of fossil fuel leasing). Nor will they substantially change the drilling that happens under Donald Trump or a future Republican president because any fossil fuel-loving administration is already free to go much further than these provisions would require them to.
To estimate the emissions impact of these provisions, the think tank Resources for the Future first tried to draw some error bars around their analysis. As a worst-case scenario, analysts modeled what would happen if the onshore drilling that happened during the Trump administration occurred every year from 2025 to 2050. Under this “Trump forever” scenario, emissions increase about 2.1 gigatons from 2025 to 2050. Under a less dire scenario, they would increase by about 0.6 gigatons during the same period.
These estimates almost certainly exceed what EPRA would actually do, Kevin Rennert, the director of RFF’s federal climate policy initiative, told me.
“None of the provisions would require the levels of leasing that we’re analyzing in the high-leasing scenario,” he said. “It’s clear [that the model is] a high upper bound on what EPRA itself would drive.” The provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso bill, in other words, are aimed much more at putting a floor under a future Democratic administration than they are raising a ceiling for a future Republican administration.
(Over all these discussions hangs a curious question about drilling for oil and gas on public land: How important is it, really? But that’s a question for another time.)
How you feel about this reform effort ultimately depends on how you feel about gambling. Is it worth hamstringing a future Democratic president’s ability to hem in oil production in exchange for unleashing a wave of new transmission under the Trump administration? How much do you weigh building more renewables versus selling more fossil fuels to the world?
Trump’s victory last month also changes the calculus. His administration will increase onshore oil and gas leasing regardless of whether this bill passes or not. He will stop the Energy Department’s effort to slow down the construction of LNG terminals and approve a new wave of projects. All of the bill’s support for fossil fuels, in other words, would be moot — Trump will do that stuff anyway. So the question becomes whether the bill’s support for new transmission infrastructure 1) actually builds new power lines, and 2) provides a useful tailwind for renewables and clean energy during what would otherwise be a difficult four years.
You can go in almost endless loops through the politics here. Given Trump’s antipathy toward renewables, why should we expect his administration to allow a transmission buildout in the first place, regardless of what Congress says? In which case, maybe the bill isn’t worth it. But on the other hand, maybe it is — since Trump’s going to do everything he can to juice fossil fuels and fight renewables, why not pass the bill and give power system regulators in blue and purple states an extra tool to juice clean energy construction? And hey, given Trump’s friendliness toward the AI boom, maybe he’ll wind up having to build more transmission just to service data centers.
We can’t make that political call quite yet. Until we know exactly how Westerman’s addition to the legislation would change NEPA, it’s hard to say where lawmakers should come down. But what’s clear is that this may be Congress’s last chance to deal with permitting reform for a while. Next year, the Republican majority is likely to be focused on tax cuts, and it’s not even clear that the reconciliation process would allow for changing permitting law. “We’re pretty pessimistic that you could include anything on permitting or transmission or any of these other things in the reconciliation process,” Devin Hartman, a policy director at the center-right think tank the R Street Institute, told Heatmap this week.
So this is it for permitting reform — it’s now or never for this set of changes. In a year full of surprises for climate and environmental law, we may yet get one more.
Jael Holzman contributed reporting.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the magnitude of emissions reductions from the Manchin-Barrasso bill found in Third Way’s analysis.
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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
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