You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
With the Las Vegas sun bearing down and temperatures heading into triple digits, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the warmup acts at a recent Donald Trump rally, offered the crowd a vision more terrifying than the heat that would send six attendees to the hospital. “If you think gas prices are high now,” Greene said, “just wait until you’re forced to drive an electric vehicle!”
Amid the lusty boos that ensued at the mention of legally mandated EV purchases, there must have been at least a few rallygoers saying to themselves, Wait, if we all have to drive EVs, would that mean we’re … not using any gas at all?
A future of 100% EV deployment (forced by a tyrannical government or not) won’t be arriving any time soon. But with more EVs on the road each year, and as a wider array of models become available and sticker prices get closer to comparable cars with internal combustion engines, we can at least foresee the day when the price of gas isn’t so potent a political issue.
Just imagine it: No more politicians holding press conferences at gas stations so they can be photographed pointing angrily at the sign with today’s prices, no more ads with candidates pretending to fill up their pickups, no more disingenuous thundering about how the president ruined your life by letting gas prices rise.
Contra Rep. Greene, wider adoption of EVs should in theory produce lower gas prices (though oil-producing countries will certainly do whatever they can to stop that), since every EV on the road reduces demand for gas. That’s in the aggregate, but on a personal level, switching to an EV reduces your demand for gas to zero. Anyone who drove one in June 2022, when retail prices reached their recent peak of nearly $5 a gallon, knows what I’m talking about: Driving past a gas station, noticing a price on the sign higher than they could remember it ever being, then saying “Doesn’t matter to me!” (Average electricity prices were up a modest 13% in June 2022 compared to a year earlier, whereas gas shot up 60%.)
But they were the minority, and Republicans were eager to blame that price spike — caused by a combination of the post-pandemic economic revival and restrictions on Russian oil following the invasion of Ukraine — on President Biden. Entrepreneurs began selling stickers with a picture of Biden pointing and the words “I did that” so you could stick them on your local gas pump. Republicans called it “Joe Biden’s gas hike,” and took every opportunity to lay the increase at the president’s feet. "I'll tell you what, the little stickers on gas pumps all across the country illustrate the American people know exactly whose fault this is," said Sen. Ted Cruz in May 2022. "This was deliberate. This isn't an accident." Oddly, when prices came down, neither Cruz nor his colleagues thanked the president for saving American drivers so much money.
At the moment, gas prices are averaging $3.45 a gallon nationwide — not particularly low, but not so high that they’re going to doom Biden’s reelection bid (and they may fall further in the coming months). As a result, the issue hasn’t dominated the presidential campaign, which is a relief not only for those who cringe when both parties promote cheaper and more plentiful fossil fuels, but also for anyone who wishes politics weren’t so gripped by inanity.
Unfortunately, rising gas prices fill politicians with terror, incentivizing them not only to engage in ridiculous posturing but to make policy decisions that only reinforce the fiction that prices are within the government’s direct control. They all know that gas occupies a unique place in people’s economic perceptions, since no other product has its ever-changing price advertised on large signs on 145,000 street corners around the country. Even a slight bump sends them rushing to reassure the voters that they will move heaven and earth to get those prices down.
The truth that few politicians want to admit — neither the president’s party, which wants to portray him as powerful and decisive, nor the opposition, which wants to blame him for everything people don’t like — is that the president has very little ability to bring down the price of gas in the short run.
One thing the country’s chief executive can do is sell off part of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to increase the supply on world markets, but the effect of doing so is limited and temporary. President Biden has been unusually aggressive on that score, starting with an unprecedented release of 180 million barrels in 2022. The administration moved to refill the reserve when the price dropped, making a tidy profit, but it’s also been eager to trumpet more releases, as it did last month when it announced a release of 1 million barrels from a Northeast reserve. “The Biden-Harris administration is laser-focused on lowering prices at the pump for American families, especially as drivers hit the road for summer driving season,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
But it’s unlikely to make much of a difference. Even by the administration’s own estimates, the 2022 release of 180 million barrels temporarily reduced prices at the pump by at most around thirty cents a gallon, and perhaps much less. In other words, SPR releases are mostly about the president looking like he’s taking action.
The politics of gas prices are simultaneously real and fake: Real because higher prices impose genuine hardship on millions of people, especially those with modest incomes who have no choice but to drive, and fake because everyone pretends that the government can control whether prices rise or fall. The result is a political debate that could hardly be more divorced from the actual issues involved.
Which is why, even apart from the climate and economic benefits, a (mostly) post-internal combustion future will be so much better than the present. Not only will most of us be able to drive past the remaining gas stations and not even care what the prices are, there will be one fewer topic for cynical politicians to use for pandering and demagoguery. That’s certainly something to look forward to.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.