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A guide to the year’s biggest environmental fight — and some of the most important changes that could result.
Pending catastrophe, the most important environmental policy debate in Washington this year will be about a set of questions that have come to be known as “permitting reform.”
Essentially, the government is poised to change the laws and procedures that govern how it approves new infrastructure, from highways to subways, wind farms to oil pipelines. The outcome of the debate will alter how America fights climate change and builds clean energy — and whether it further embraces fossil fuels.
Some of the oldest ideas in American environmental law are up for grabs. For the first time in decades, both parties want something to change about the country’s permitting process: Republicans want to loosen federal environmental reviews; while Democrats want to simplify and speed up how new electricity transmission is built, which would inherently boost renewables. That should make a deal possible — and indeed, lawmakers have entertained striking a bargain in a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
Yet permitting reform is unusually hard to follow. As of May 2023, at least six different bills are floating around Congress: House Democrats,Senate Democrats,House Republicans, andSenateRepublicans have each proposed a bill (or two), as has Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a key moderate who leads the Senate’s energy committee. Each of these bills consists of dozens of unique policies and proposals, and their goals range from hastening the end of oil to rejuvenating fossil fuels.
Below we’ve compiled a cheat sheet on some of the biggest questions in the 2023 permitting-reform debate without getting into the weeds of each separate bill. We’ll update it as the process continues.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
It’s really hard to build new power lines in the United States — especially the kind of long-distance, high-voltage power lines that can move electricity across the country.
Because a shortage of power lines is holding back America’s renewables revolution. With a bigger, more interconnected grid, you can link the country’s windiest, sunniest areas to its power-hungry cities and suburbs, and balance out electricity demand across regions.
If America doesn’t double its rate of power-line construction, then 80% of the carbon benefits from Biden’s climate law will be lost, according to an analysis from Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor.
Building a new transmission line requires getting approval from dozens of organizations along a proposed route, including every city, county, and state government. (Building a pipeline is much easier.) And utilities along the route have to agree about how to divide up its costs.
They want to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a bipartisan panel usually called FERC, the authority to decide where new interstate power lines should go and who should pay for them. (FERC already has that power over natural-gas pipelines.)
Democrats also want FERC to require each region to have a baseline amount of transmission with its neighbors, and to open an office that will manage and coordinate new transmission projects.
They haven’t proposed much, although the Senate GOP’s bill would prevent a president from blocking a cross-border pipeline or transmission line — a not-so-veiled attempt to help fossil fuels and avert another Keystone XL debacle.
His proposal would let FERC approve a new power line — but only if a state government has already blocked it for a year or more. He also wants FERC to set rules about who pays for a transmission project.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Every new power plant or renewable project has to enter the “interconnection queue” — effectively, a waiting list to get plugged into America’s jammed and overloaded power grid.
Because it keeps the grid from decarbonizing. The longer that new clean-energy projects have to wait in line, the longer that existing, dirty energy sources provide most of our electricity.
It now takes about four years for new projects to clear the interconnection queue, and more than 75% of renewable projects get canceled before they get to the front of the line.
At root, it’s because America doesn’t have enough power lines. But it’s also because in some places where the grid is clogged, utilities will force a wind or solar developer to pay not only for their own grid hookup, but also for crucial upgrades across the power grid — even those hundreds of miles from a project. That’s partially because the interconnect rules were written for companies building big coal and nuclear plants, not smaller renewable farms.
They want FERC to issue some ground rules about who can pay for grid upgrades, so that utilities can’t force renewable developers to foot the entire bill for them.
They haven’t proposed anything.
He hasn’t proposed anything.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Before a federal agency can build, approve, or change almost anything — whether it’s authorizing a space port or banning cars from a road in a city park — it must study how that action will impact the environment. It also must seek public comment and publish alternatives to its plan.
These studies, which are required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), can run thousands of pages long and take years to finish.
It’s not … depending on who you talk to. NEPA doesn’t require that the government actually change anything because of its study; only that it publishes it and seeks public comment. While environmentalists can’t use NEPA to block a polluting project, they can sue the government to get it to add information to an environmental-impact report, which can sometimes delay a project long enough for it to get canceled.
Some environmentalists say that NEPA is an important tool to waylay fossil-fuel development. (It’s how activists delayed the Dakota Access Pipeline for a year or so.) But others say that NEPA is now mostly slowing down the green transition, and that it has given “corporate interests and rich NIMBYs” a veto over rapid climate action.
It takes 4.5 years on average to finish an environmental-impact statement, the most stringent kind of NEPA review — but that’s an average. The NEPA review of renovations to Washington, D.C.’s main public-transit hub has taken eight years and counting.
When NEPA was first passed in 1969, supporters believed that it would give Americans an expansive new right to a healthy environment. Liberal lawyers hoped that NEPA might reorient all of federal policy in a greener direction, like the Civil Rights Act did for race and gender discrimination a few years earlier.
That didn’t happen. By the mid-1970s, the court system had hemmed in NEPA, turning it into a paperwork mandate, not a substantive right. That means NEPA lawsuits — of which there are more than 100 every year — feature a lot of bickering over procedural details.
Senate Democrats would impose a one-year deadline for light NEPA reviews and a two-year deadline for the most stringent reviews — but those deadlines would only apply to projects that fight or adapt to climate change, and there would be no penalty for missing them. The House bill asks the White House to write new rules for NEPA studies.
The GOP would require one- and two-year deadlines for NEPA studies, but for all types of projects, not just those related to climate change. If an agency missed those deadlines, then under the Senate GOP bill, the project being studied would immediately and irrevocably get approved. (The House GOP, meanwhile, would charge the offending agency a fine.)
Republicans would also impose a 300-page limit on NEPA studies for complex projects and a 150-page limit on most projects. Today, the average NEPA study is more than 500 pages long.
He’s proposed the same page limits and deadlines as Republicans, but with weaker penalties and no automatic approval.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Technically, NEPA doesn’t require that agencies look into whether a proposed federal project would worsen climate change. The Biden administration has required agencies to take it into account, but that could be reversed by a future administration.
It’s a little silly that the government would write a 500-page report about a project’s environmental impact — but not say anything about its carbon emissions.
Because every administration — and every agency — implements NEPA in a different way. The courts also set some ground rules about what a NEPA study must include, but the extremely conservative Supreme Court is unlikely to require NEPA studies to include climate effects anytime soon.
They want to require agencies to consider a project’s impact on the climate, including whether not doing the project would raise emissions.
House Republicans want to block agencies from considering climate change — or any negative environmental impacts more than 10 years in the future — when preparing a NEPA study.
Senate Republicans would also forbid FERC from considering whether any project would raise or lower emissions.
He hasn’t proposed anything.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
NEPA fights never end. Americans generally have up to six years to sue the government over a NEPA study, and the ensuing court battles can take years to resolve.
Depends on who you ask. The lack of a deadline can create an aura of uncertainty around public projects: Years after a federal agency approves an infrastructure project (including a clean-energy project), that project can still be challenged and blocked in court — even if construction on it has already started.
For some progressives, that doesn’t seem so bad, because it lets environmental lawyers drag fossil-fuel companies into lengthy NEPA lawsuits over proposed pipelines or refineries. But other progressives argue that most new energy projects will be zero carbon anyway, so NEPA fights allow conservatives and NIMBYs to veto clean energy.
Because Congress didn’t envision the modern permitting process when it first passed NEPA, and the law doesn’t contain a statute of limitations.
Senate Democrats want to impose a three-year limit on bringing a NEPA lawsuit, and they’d immediately elevate a NEPA suit to the local federal appeals court. House Democrats haven’t proposed anything.
Republicans in both chambers want to add a three- or four-month statute of limitations to NEPA. Senate Republicans would go further and require the courts to rule on any NEPA case within six months. These litigation deadlines could sharply limit environmentalists’ ability to fight fossil-fuel infrastructure.
His bill would add a five-month statute of limitations to NEPA.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
The federal offices that handle most of the NEPA-related paperwork don’t have enough employees and suffer high staff turnover, which slows down their ability to quickly finish the easiest studies.
According to some progressives, a lack of funding for the agencies that implement NEPA is the biggest driver of permitting-related slowdowns. They argue that the most common kind of NEPA studies are completed in a year or so, and that only the most stringent NEPA studies regularly drag on. (Plenty of federal actions, such as building a new train station or transmission line, require a stringent NEPA study.)
When legal scholars at the University of Utah looked at 41,000 NEPA decisions of all kinds made by the U.S. Forest Service, they found that most delays were caused by agency understaffing, turnover, or delays in getting information from applicants. They also blamed unstable budgets, inadequate technology, and conflicting guidance from other laws, such as those governing historical preservation.
A decade of federal cost-cutting, among other reasons. The Department of the Interior lost 6% of its staff during the Trump administration and has only gained 2% since. FERC has also struggled to hire qualified workers.
Senate Democrats would make every agency identify its NEPA workforce needs annually and then give it the power to hire accordingly. House Democrats would let FERC pay people more than normal federal law allows.
House Republicans would require the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Forest Service to prepare an outreach plan for hiring new permitting employees.
He’s proposed allowing FERC to exceed the federal payscale, too.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
New geothermal plants could generate a huge amount of zero-carbon electricity. Yet securing a permit to install a geothermal plant on federal lands — where the richest geothermal resources exist — can take years.
Because it’s comparatively easy to drill for oil and natural gas on federal land: Oil and gas drilling is categorically exempt from parts of NEPA, and a special office in the Bureau of Land Management handles fossil-fuel permits. So even though geothermal firms use the same equipment as oil and gas companies — but don’t create the same carbon emissions — it is much harder to drill for geothermal energy, and therefore much more expensive.
About 90% of “viable geothermal resources” — places where it makes sense to drill for Earth’s heat — are located on federal lands in the West. This isn’t parkland, to be clear, but government-owned land now used for ranching, hunting, mining, or recreation.
Because geothermal is a new industry. Until recent improvements in drilling, geothermal only made sense in a few parts of the country. Now it could be used more widely.
Senate Democrats want the Interior Department to make sure geothermal drilling permits are handled in the same way that oil-and-gas drilling permits are.
House Republicans would exempt some geothermal projects from having to get permits at all. And Senate Republicans would tell the Interior Department to defer to state law when granting new geothermal permits.
While supportive of geothermal power, he hasn’t proposed anything on this issue.
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It’s not early phase-out. These 3 changes could overhaul the law’s clean electricity supports.
On Monday, the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee released the first draft of its rewrite of America’s clean energy tax credits.
The proposal might look, at first, like a cautious paring back of the tax credits. But the proposal amounts to a backdoor repeal of the policies, according to energy system and tax analysts.
“The bill is written to come across as reasonable, but the devil is in the details,” Robbie Orvis, a senior analyst at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate think tank, told me. “It may not be literally the worst text we envisioned seeing, but it’s probably close.”
The proposal would strangle new energy development so quickly that it could raise power costs by as much as 7% over the next decade, according to the Rhodium Group, an energy and policy analysis firm.
Senate Republicans have already indicated that the proposal is unworkable. But to understand why, it’s worth diving into the specific requirements that render the proposal so destructive.
The clean energy tax credits are one of the centerpieces of American energy policy. They’re meant to spur companies to deploy new forms of energy technology, such as nuclear fusion or advanced geothermal wells, and simultaneously to cut carbon pollution from the American power grid.
The U.S. government has long used the tax code to encourage the build-out of wind turbines or solar panels. But when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, they rewrote a pair of key tax credits so that any technology that generates clean electricity would receive financial support.
Under the law as enacted, these clean electricity tax credits provide 10 years of support to any electricity project — no matter howit generates power — for the foreseeable future. But the new Republican proposal would begin phasing down the value of the credit starting in 2029, and end the program entirely in 2032.
That might sound like a slow and even reasonable phase-out. But a series of smaller changes to the law’s text introduce significant uncertainty about which projects would continue to qualify for the tax credit in the interim. Taken together, these new requirements would kill most, if not all, of the tax credits’ value.
Here are three reasons why the Republican proposal would prove so devastating to the American clean electricity industry.
The new Ways and Means proposal begins to phase out the clean energy tax credits immediately. The proposal cuts the value of the tax credit by 20% per year starting in 2029, and ends the credit entirely in 2032.
But the GOP proposal changes a key phrase that helps financiers invest confidently in a given project.
Under the law as it stands today, developers can’t claim a tax credit until a project is “placed in service” — meaning that it is generating electricity and selling it to the grid. But a project qualifies for a tax credit in the year that construction on that project begins.
For example, imagine a utility that begins building a new geothermal power plant this year, but doesn’t finish construction and connect it to the grid until 2029. Under current law, that company could qualify for the value of the credit as it stands today, but it wouldn’t begin to get money back on its taxes until 2029.
But the GOP proposal would change this language. Under the House Republican text, projects only qualify for a tax credit when they are “placed in service,” regardless of when construction begins. This means that the new geothermal power plant in the earlier example could only get tax credits as set at the 2029 value — regardless of when construction begins.
What’s more, if work on the project were delayed, say by a natural disaster or unexpected equipment shortage, and the power plant’s completion date was pushed into the following year, then the project would only qualify for credits as set at the 2030 value.
In other words, companies and utilities would have no certainty about a tax credit’s value until a project is completed and placed in service. Any postponement or slowdown at any part of the process — even if for a reason totally outside of a developer’s control — could reduce a tax credit’s value.
This makes the tax credits far less dependable than they are today. Generally, companies have more ability to plan around when construction on a power plant begins than they do over when it is placed in service.
This change will significantly raise financing costs for new energy projects of all types because it means that companies won’t be able to finalize their capital stack until a project is completed and turned on. The most complicated and adventurous projects — such as new geothermal, nuclear, or fusion power plants — could face the highest cost inflation.
The Inflation Reduction Act as it stands today attaches a “foreign entity of concern” rule to its $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle buyers.
In order to qualify for that EV tax credit, automakers had to cut the percentage of Chinese-processed minerals and battery components that appear in their electric models every year. This phased in gradually over time — the idea being that while China dominates the EV and battery supply chain today, the requirement would provide a consistent spur to reshore production.
Somewhat ironically, the GOP proposal ditches the EV tax credit and its accompanying foreign sourcing rules. But it applies a strict version of the foreign entity of concern rule to every other tax credit in the law, including the clean electricity tax credits.
Under the House proposal, no project can qualify for the tax credits unless it receives no “material support” from a Chinese-linked entity. The language defines “material support” aggressively and expansively — it means any “any component, subcomponent, or applicable critical mineral” that is “extracted, processed, recycled, manufactured, or assembled.”
This provision, in other words, would essentially disqualify the use of any Chinese-made part, subcomponent, or metal in the construction of a clean electricity project, although the rule includes a partial and narrow carve-out for some components that are bought from a third-party. Even a mistakenly Chinese-sourced bolt could result in a project losing millions of dollars of tax credits.
Technically, the law also disqualifies the use of goods from other “foreign entities of concern” as defined under U.S. law, which include Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But China is the United States’ third largest trading partner, and it is the only manufacturer of the type of goods that matter to the law.
Solar projects would face immediate challenges under the new rule. China and its domestic companies command more than 80% of the market share for all stages of the solar panel manufacturing process, according to the International Energy Agency.
But then again, the proposal would be an issue for virtually all energy projects. Copper wiring, steel frames, grams of key metals — even geothermal plants rely on individual Chinese-made industrial components, according to Seaver Wang, an analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. These parts also intermingle on the global market, meaning that companies can’t be certain where a given part was made or where it comes from.
These new and stricter rules would kick in two years after the reconciliation bill passes, which likely means 2027.
This provision by itself would be unworkable. But it is made even worse by being coupled to the tax credit’s change to a “placed in service” standard. That’s because projects that are already under construction today might not meet these new foreign entity rules, essentially stripping them of tax credits that companies had already been banking on.
These projects have assumed that they will qualify for the tax credits’ full value, no matter when their power plant is completed, because they have already begun construction. But the GOP proposal would change this retroactively, possibly threatening the financial viability of energy projects that grid managers have been assuming will come online in the next few years.
In some ways, these two changes taken together are “worse than repeal,” Mike O’Boyle, an Energy Innovation analyst, told me. “A number of projects under construction now will lose eligibility."
It is also made worse by the House GOP plan to phase out the tax credits. If companies could plan on the tax credits remaining on the books long-term then the foreign entity rules might spur the creation of a larger domestic — or at least non-Chinese — supply chain for some clean energy inputs. But because the credits will phase out by 2032 regardless, fewer projects will qualify, and it won’t be worth it for companies to invest in alternative supply chains.
Finally, the House Republican proposal would end companies’ ability to sell the value of tax credits to other firms. The IRA had made it easier for utilities and developers to transfer the value of tax credits to other companies — essentially allowing companies with a lot of tax liability, such as banks, to acquire the rights to renewable developers’ credits.
The GOP proposal ends that right for every tax credit, even those that Republicans have historically looked on more favorably, such as the tax credit that rewards companies for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This change — coupled with the foreign entity and placed-in-service rules — will have an impact today on power markets by further gumming up the pipeline of new energy projects planned across the country, according to Advait Arun, an analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise.
The end to transferability “functionally imposes higher marginal tax rates on all of these projects,” Arun told me. “The prices that developers will get for their tax credits on the tax equity market today will be a lot lower than normal.”
That could significantly raise the cost of any new energy projects that get planned. And that will lead in the medium term to a further slowdown in the growth of electricity supply, just as turbine shortages have made it more difficult than ever to build a new natural gas power plant.
While many of these changes may seem academic, they will hit energy consumers faster than legislators might realize. Natural gas prices in the U.S. have been unusually high in 2025. A slowdown in the growth of non-fossil energy will further stress natural gas supplies, raising power prices.
Taken together, Orvis told me, these changes to the IRA “will increase the price of the vast majority of new capacity coming online next year,” Orvis said. “It’s an immediate price hike for new energy, and you can’t replace that with new gas.”
Between the budget reconciliation process and an impending vote to end California’s electric vehicle standards, a lot of the EV maker’s revenue stands to go poof.
It’s shaping up to be a very bad week for Tesla. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s draft budget proposal released Sunday night axes two of the primary avenues by which the electric vehicle giant earns regulatory credits. Congress also appears poised to vote to revoke California’s authority to implement its Zero-Emission Vehicle program by the end of the month, another key source of credits for the automaker. The sale of all regulatory credits combined earned the company a total of $595 million in the first quarter on a net income of just $409 million — that is, they represented its entire margin of profitability. On the whole, credits represented 38% of Tesla’s net income last year.
To add insult to injury, the House Ways and Means committee on Monday proposed eliminating the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 consumer EV tax credit, the used EVs tax credit, and the commercial EVs tax credit by year’s end. The move comes as part of the House’s larger budget-making process. And while it will likely be months before a new budget is finalized, with Trump seeking to extend his 2017 tax cuts and Congress limited in its spending ability, much of the IRA is on the chopping block. That is bad news for clean energy companies across the spectrum, from clean hydrogen producers to wind energy companies and battery manufacturers. But as recently as a few months ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was sounding cavalier.
After aligning himself with Trump during the election, Musk came out last year in support of ending the $7,500 consumer EV tax credit, along with all subsidies in all industries generally. He wrote on X that taking away the EV tax credit “will only help Tesla,” presumably assuming that while his company could withstand the policy headwinds, it would hurt emergent EV competitors even more, thus paradoxically helping Tesla eliminate its competition.
While it looks like Musk will get his wish, he probably didn’t account for a small but meaningful carveout in the Ways and Means committee proposal that allows the tax credit to stand through the end of 2026 for companies that have yet to sell 200,000 EVs in their lifetime. While Tesla’s sales figures are orders of magnitude beyond this, the extension will give a boost to its smaller competitors, as well as potentially some larger automakers with fewer EV sales to their credit.
A number of other provisions in the Ways and Means committee’s proposal spell bad news for Tesla and EV automakers on the whole. These include the elimination of the $4,000 tax credit for used EVs as well as the $7,500 tax credit for commercial EVs — which leased cars also qualify for. This second credit, often referred to as the “leasing loophole,” allows consumers leasing EVs to redeem the full tax credit even if their vehicle doesn’t meet the domestic content requirements for the buyer’s credit. The committee also wants to phase out the advanced manufacturing tax credit by the end of 2031, one year earlier than previously planned. While not a huge change, this credit incentivizes the domestic production of clean energy components such as battery cells, battery modules, and solar inverters — all products Tesla is heavily invested in.
The domestic regulatory credits that comprise such an outsize portion of Tesla’s profits, meanwhile, come from a mix of state and federal standards, all of which are under attack. These are California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle program, which sets ZEV production and sales mandates, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas emissions standards.
While the mandates differ in their ambition and implementation mechanisms, all three give automakers credits when they make progress toward EV production targets, fuel economy standards, or emissions standards; exceed these requirements, and automakers earn extra credits. Vehicle manufacturers can then trade those additional credits to carmakers that aren’t meeting state or federal targets. Since Tesla only makes EVs, it always earns more credits than it needs, and many automakers rely on buying these credits to comply with all three regulations.
It’s unclear as of now whether lawmakers have the authority to eliminate the federal fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards via budget reconciliation. A Senate stricture known as the Byrd Rule mandates that provisions align with the basic purpose of the reconciliation process: implementing budgetary changes; those with only “incidental” budgetary impacts can thus be deemed “extraneous” and excluded from the final bill. It’s yet to be seen how the standards in question will be categorized. At first blush, fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards are a stretch to meet the Byrd Rule, but that determination will take weeks, or even potentially months to play out.
What’s for sure is that California’s ZEV program cannot be eliminated through this process, as the program derives its authority from a Clean Air Act waiver, which was first granted to the state by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1967. This waiver allows California to set stricter emissions standards than those at the federal level because of the “compelling and extraordinary circumstances” the state faces when it comes to air quality in the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles basin. California’s latest targets — which require all model year 2035 cars sold in the state to be zero emissions — have been adopted by 11 other states, plus Washington D.C.
These increasingly ambitious goals would presumably cause the tax credits market — and thus Tesla’s profits — to heat up as well, as most automakers would struggle to fully electrify in the next 10 years. But the House voted at the beginning of the month to eliminate California’s latest EPA waiver, granted in December of last year. Now, it’s up to the Senate to decide whether they want to follow suit.
To accomplish this task, Republicans have called upon a legislative process known as the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn newly implemented federal rules. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, for one, has been vocal about using the process to end California’s so-called “EV mandate,” writing in the Wall Street Journal last week that “it’s time for the Senate to finish the job.” And yet other Senate Republicans are reluctant to attempt to roll back California’s waiver. The Government Accountability Officeand the Senate Parliamentarian have both determined that the regulatory allowance ought not to be subject to the Congressional Review Act as it’s an EPA “order” rather than a “rule.” Going against this guidance could thus set a precedent that gives Congress a broad ability to gut executive-level rules.
During his first term, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stood in firm opposition to efforts to roll back fuel efficiency standards. But lately, as the administration has started turning its longstanding anti-EV rhetoric into actual policy, Trump’s new best friend has been relatively quiet. Tesla’s stock is down about 25% since Trump took office, as investors worry that Musk’s political preoccupations have kept him from focusing on his company’s performance. Not to mention the fact that Musk's enthusiastic support for Trump, major role in mass federal layoffs, and, well, whole personality have alienated his liberal-leaning customer base.
So while Musk may have staged a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn in March, awing the President with the ways in which “everything’s computer,” he’s presumably well aware of exactly how Trump’s policies — and his own involvement in them — stand to deeply hurt his business. Whether Tesla will make it through this regulatory onslaught and self-inflicted brand damage as a profitable company remains to be seen. But with Musk planning to slink away from the White House and back into the boardroom, and with House leaders hoping to complete work on the reconciliation bill by Memorial Day, we should start to get answers soon enough.
On gutting energy grants, the Inflation Reduction Act’s last legs, and dishwashers
Current conditions: Eighty of Minnesota’s 87 counties had red flag warnings on Monday, with conditions expected to remain dry and hot through Tuesday • 15 states in the South and Midwest will experience “extreme” humidity this week • It will be 99 degrees Fahrenheit today in Emerson, Manitoba. The municipality hit 100 last weekend — the earliest in the year Canada has ever recorded triple digits.
Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce released their draft budget proposal on Sunday night, and my colleague Matthew Zeitlin dove into its widespread cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean energy and environment programs. Among the rescissions — clawbacks of unspent money in existing programs — and other proposals, Matthew highlights:
Those are just a few of the cuts, which the Sierra Club estimates would add up to $1.6 billion for programs related to decarbonizing heavy industry alone. You can read Matthew’s whole analysis here.
Republicans on the Committee on Energy and Commerce weren’t the only ones who’ve been busy. On Monday, the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, proposed overhauling clean energy tax credits. Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo took a look at those proposals, including:
There’s much more, which Emily gets into here.
In response to President Trump’s executive order last week ordering the Energy Department to “eliminate restrictive water pressure and efficiency rules” for appliances, the DOE published a list of 47 regulations on Monday that it has targeted as “burdensome and costly.” Appliances regulated by the DOE’s list include cook tops, dishwashers, compressors, and microwave ovens, with the agency claiming the deregulation effort would cut 125,000 words from the Code of Federal Regulations and “save the American people an estimated $11 billion,”The New York Timesreports. By the government’s own accounting, though, efficiency standards saved the average American household about $576 on energy and gas bills in 2024, and reduced energy spending for households and businesses by $105 billion in total. “If this attack on consumers succeeds, President Trump would be raising costs dramatically for families as manufacturers dump energy- and water-wasting products into the market,” Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, said in a statement. “Fortunately, it’s patently illegal, so hold your horses.”
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin said Monday that the Trump administration plans to target stop-start technology in cars. According to the EPA’s website, start-stop technology saves fuel “by turning off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop and automatically starting it back up when you step on the accelerator,” improving fuel economy by 4% to 5%, especially in conditions like stop-and-go city driving. Zeldin, though, characterized the technology as when “your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy. EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.” Neither Zeldin nor the EPA offered further details on what that might entail.
More than 2,100 climate adaptation companies generated a combined $1 trillion in revenue last year by offering products and services mitigating the risks of climate change, a new study by London Stock Exchange Group found. “One question that we are getting a lot at the moment is: ‘With the Trump administration in office, what does that mean for the green economy?,’” Jaakko Kooroshy, LSEG’s global head of sustainable investment research, told Bloomberg in an interview about the report. The answer is “this thing is now so big and so robust, it’s not going to implode just like that,” he added.
The analysis looked at 20,000 companies worldwide and “found that adaptation-related revenues last year accounted for roughly a fifth of the $5 trillion global green economy,” with green buildings and water-related infrastructure being the most significant contributors, Bloomberg adds. LSEG further noted that if all companies related to the “green economy” were considered their own industry group, they’d have had the best performance of any equity sector over the past decade.
Thermasol
Wellness company Thermasol has introduced the first off-grid, solar-powered sauna in the U.S., which can reach 170 degrees Fahrenheit in about half an hour.