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There’s a decent chance that whoever the Republican Party nominates for president in 2024 will eventually win the White House.
That means they will have a huge sway over how — and whether — the United States pursues its energy and climate goals during this decisive decade for decarbonization. So while some — but not all — Republican officials reject the reality of climate change, key differences exist in the way each GOP presidential candidate talks about the issue.
Ahead of the first Republican primary debate, here is a guide to each of the major candidates and where they stand on climate change and energy questions. We plan on updating it through the campaign.
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Who is he? The 45th — and maybe the 47th — president of the United States. A four-time criminal defendant.
What he says about climate change: That it’s a “hoax,” “a total hoax,” “an expensive hoax,” and “a total, and very expensive, hoax.” Then in 2018 he told “Sixty Minutes” that “it’s not a hoax.” But recently he’s been saying it’s a hoax again.
What he did about climate change: Oh, what didn’t he try to do? He rolled back more than 100 climate or environmental regulations, pulled America out of the Paris Agreement, and expanded oil drilling in Alaska. He declined to regulate toxic particulate air pollution and tried to subsidize the coal industry. That said, his rollbacks were rarely as effective as he hoped because the court system often blocked them for lack of paperwork.
What he wants to do next: More of the same. He has promised to end any support for electric vehicles, pull America out of the Paris Agreement again, and build more oil refineries and gas pipelines. “Nobody has more liquid gold under their feet than the United States of America. And we will use it and profit by it and live with it,” he said.
Who is he? The 46th governor of Florida.
What’s his deal? DeSantis hates the effects of climate change, but doesn’t want to touch the causes.
What he says about climate change: DeSantis would prefer not to use that phrase — it’s too left-wing. “This idea of, quote, ‘climate change’ has become politicized. My environmental policy is just to try to do things that benefit Floridians,” he said in 2019. A year earlier, he offered: “I am not a global warming person. I don’t want that label on me.”
But he sometimes brags about his green record, even if he never says climate or carbon. “In Florida, we’ve seen emissions go down dramatically in the last 10 years,” he told Trey Gowdy, the Fox News host, this spring. “But that’s through market and innovation, that’s not through mandates.”
What he’s done about climate change: Despite his personal reticence to use the c-word, he lifted an alleged state-level ban on saying climate change, appointed Florida’s first state resilience officer, and has signed millions of dollars into law to fight flooding and sea-level rise. He also ordered the state environmental agency to base its decisions on the best-available science.
Yet lately he’s declined hundreds of millions in federal energy-efficiency funding and vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have saved Florida $277 million by replacing some state-owned cars with electric vehicles.
What he wants to do as president: DeSantis has promised to “reverse the federal government's attempt to force people to buy electric vehicles.” He has also pledged to “unleash our domestic energy sector” and “modernize and protect our grid,” although he hasn’t said how he would do either.
You probably didn’t know: DeSantis implemented a fracking ban soon after becoming governor, but hasn’t gotten the legislature to enact it.
Who is he? The 48th vice president of the United States and a likely star witness at one of Donald Trump’s criminal trials.
What he says about climate change: Back when he was running for the House in 2000, he said climate change was “a myth.” More recently, he’s recognized that human activities have “some” impact on the climate, but rejected the idea that climate change is a threat to national security.
What he’s done about climate change: As vice president, he helped Trump repeal dozens of climate protections. He praised the president’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement, saying it was “so refreshing to have a presidents who stands without apology ... for America first.”
What he wants to do: Pence has proposed perhaps the most detailed energy policy of any GOP candidate. Although he has promised increasing production of “all forms of U.S. energy,” much of his policy would boost fossil fuels: He wants to open up oil-and-gas drilling on federal land, loosen permitting rules to speed pipeline construction, increase oil refining capacity, and repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Who is she? The former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley was President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018.
What she says about climate change: That it’s real, man-made, and that it could present threats to the United States.
What she’s done about climate change: As Trump’s UN ambassador, she helped orchestrate America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the nonbinding global climate treaty. Back when she was South Carolina’s governor, she allegedly suppressed a state-level climate report.
What she wants to do as president: Haley has been vague, although she has said most liberal climate policies would “cost trillions and destroy our economy.” She’s backed efforts to capture carbon dioxide from industrial facilities. She also wants to plant more trees.
Who is he? A former insurance salesman, Tim Scott has served as a senator from South Carolina since 2013. He is the first African-American senator to be elected from the South since Reconstruction.
What he says about climate change: He has recognized that human activities are having some influence on the climate. “I am not living under a rock,” he said.
What he’s done about climate change: Scott’s decade-long Senate record is notably unfriendly to the climate. He voted against the Kigali Amendment, a global climate treaty that phased out the use of hydrofluorocarbon pollutants, even though 19 of his GOP colleagues supported it. He also opposed the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funded EV chargers, public transit, and carbon removal experiments. And he has opposed messaging bills that recognized that human activity is driving climate change, even when his colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham, supported them.
What he wants to do about climate change: He’s been vague. A prominent Republican donor told Axios that he supports building out the next-generation nuclear-power industry. Scott has said it’s “ridiculous to talk about a climate emergency when we have a border emergency that is an existential threat right now.”
Who is he? Christie was the governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018.
What he says about climate change: That it’s real. “There’s undeniable data that CO2 levels and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing … When you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts,” he said more than a decade ago.
What he’s done about climate change: As governor, he pulled New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions from the power sector. But he also fought to cut emissions from a Pennsylvania coal plant.
What he wants to do about climate change: Like many candidates, he supports an “all-of-the-above” energy plan, although he has been kinder to climate goals than other Republicans and shown a particular interest in nuclear power. “We can’t disarm ourselves economically while we convert to cleaner energy,” he told a New Hampshire crowd in August. He supports increasing domestic oil production to help Ukraine.
Who is he? The son of Indian immigrants, Ramaswamy is the former chief executive of Roivant Sciences, a biotech company. The 38-year-old billionaire rose to prominence in conservative circles by opposing ESG investing — that is, environment, sustainability, and governance.
What he says about climate change: A lot. He told The Washington Post that he is “not a climate denier” but that global warming will not be “entirely bad.” He has also claimed that fossil fuels are “essential to human flourishing,” seeming to reject the modern scientific consensus that carbon pollution is causing climate change.
What he’s done about climate change: Ramaswamy has never held elective office. But as an anti-ESG activist, he wrote letters to Chevron telling it to stop supporting a carbon tax or monitoring some of its emissions.
What he wants to do about climate change: He appears to support almost no restrictions on carbon pollution. He wants to “drill, frack, and burn coal.” He also wants to “abandon the climate cult and unshackle nuclear energy,” even though it generates zero-carbon electricity.
Who is he? Hutchinson, a lawyer, was the governor of Arkansas from 2015 to 2023.
What he says about climate change: He told The New York Times that climate change is real and that human activities are “a contributing factor” to it. He doesn’t see it as an existential threat to the United States.
What he’s done about climate change: When campaigning for governor, Hutchinson promised to fight President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have cut carbon pollution from power plants. He praised some of President Trump’s environmental rollbacks.
What he wants to do about climate change: Hutchinson supports “energy independence” and opposes any effort to restrict carbon emissions. He told the Times that he would pull America out of the Paris Agreement and loosen rules on pipelines and drilling.
Who is he? Burgum is a former software executive and the 33rd governor of North Dakota.
What he says about climate change: Burgum told the Sioux City Journal that climate change is real, but that he doesn’t want to talk about the role that humans are playing in causing it. “The debate we're having between the different edges is one where cancel culture is alive and well because if anybody questions any aspect of this, they're immediately ostracized,” he said.
What he’s done about climate change: North Dakota is one of the country’s leading fossil-fuel producers, but Burgum has pledged to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2030 without losing that commanding position. He wants to use carbon-capture technology, which his government has helped subsidize, to meet that goal within the state.
He also created North Dakota’s first Department of Environmental Quality.
What he wants to do about climate change: He’s been vague. “Anyone who cares about the climate should want as much energy produced in America as possible and sold around the globe,” his spokesman told The Washington Post.
Read more about the politics of climate change:
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The energy sector — including oil and gas — and manufacturing took some heavy hits in the latest jobs report.
We got a much better sense of what the American labor market is doing today. And the news was not good.
The economy added only 22,000 jobs last month, far fewer than economists had predicted, according to a new release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The new data also shows that the economy gained slightly more jobs in July than we thought at the time, but that it actually lost 13,000 jobs in June — making that month the first since 2020 to see a true decline in U.S. employment.
The unemployment rate now stands at 4.3%, one tenth of a percent higher than it was last month. All in all, the American labor market has been frozen since President Trump declared “Liberation Day” and announced a bevy of new tariffs in April.
On the one hand, some aspects of that job loss shouldn’t be a surprise. As we’ve covered at Heatmap, the Trump administration has spent the past few months attacking the wind, solar, and electric vehicle industries. It has yanked subsidies from new electricity generation, rewritten rules on the fly, and waged an all-out regulatory war on offshore wind farms. Electricity costs are rising nationwide, constraining essentially all power-dependent industries except artificial intelligence.
In short: The news hasn’t been good for the transition industries. But what’s notable in this report is that the job declines are not limited to these green industries. The first eight months of Donald Trump’s presidency have been more and more damaging for the blue collar fields and heavy industries that he promised to help.
For instance: Mining, quarrying, and oil extraction lost 6,000 jobs in August. These losses were led by the oil and gas industry, as well as mining support companies. Other industries — such as coal mining firms — saw essentially no growth or very slightly declines.
More cuts are likely to come soon for the fossil fuel industry. The oil giant ConocoPhillips says it will lay off about a quarter of its roughly 13,000-person workforce before the year is out. The oilfield services company Halliburton has also been shedding workers in recent weeks, according to Reuters. The West Texas benchmark oil price has lost nearly $10 since the year began, and is now hovering around $62. That’s roughly the average breakeven price for drilling new wells in the Permian Basin.
The manufacturing industry has lost 78,000 jobs since the year began. In the past month, it shed jobs almost as fast as the federal government, which has deliberately culled its workforce, as the economic analyst Mike Konczal observed.
This manufacturing weakness is also showing up in corporate earnings. John Deere, the American farm equipment maker, has seen its income degrade through the year. It estimates that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs will cost the company $600 million in 2025, and it recently laid off several hundred workers in the Midwest.
Even industries that have previously shown some resilience — and that benefited from the AI boom — have started to stall out a bit. The utility industry lost about 1,000 jobs last month, on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the new data. (At the same time, the number of non-managerial utility workers slightly increased.) The utility sector has still gained more than 6,000 jobs compared to a year ago.
A few months ago, I quipped that you could call President Trump “Degrowth Donald” because his tax and trade policies seemed intent on raising prices and killing the carbon-intensive sectors of the American economy. (Of course, Trump was doing plenty that radical climate activists didn’t want to see, too, and his anti-renewable campaign has only gotten worse.) Now we’re seeing the president’s anti-growth policies bear fruit. It was a joke then. Now it’s just sad.
Trump’s enthusiasm for the space has proved contagious — building on what Biden started.
It’s become a well-known adage in energy circles that “critical minerals are the new oil.” As the world pushes — haltingly but persistently — toward decarbonization and electrification, minerals such as lithium, nickel, and copper have only risen in their strategic importance.
These elements are geographically concentrated, largely in spots with weighty implications for geopolitics and national security — lithium largely in South America and Australia, copper in South America, nickel in Indonesia, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and graphite in China. They’re also subject to volatile price swings and dependent on vast infrastructure to get them out of the ground. But without them, there are no batteries, no magnets, no photovoltaic cells, no semiconductors, no electrical wiring. It is no surprise, then, that it’s already been a big year for investment.
Sector-wide data is scarce, but the announcements are plentiful. Some of the biggest wins so far this year include the AI minerals discovery company Kobold, which closed a colossal $537 million funding round, software-driven mining developer Mariana Minerals landing $85 million in investment, rare earth magnet startup Vulcan Minerals raising $65 million, and minerals recycling company Cyclic Materials announcing plans for a commercial plant in Canada.
“The good investments are still the good investments,” Joe Goodman, co-founder and managing partner at the firm VoLo Earth Ventures, told me. “But I think the return opportunities are larger now.” VoLo’s primary bets include Magrathea, which has an electrolysis-based process to produce pure magnesium from seawater and brines and is reportedly in discussions to form a $100 million partnership for a commercial-scale demonstration plant, as well as Nth Cycle, which recovers and refines critical minerals from sources such as industrial waste and low-grade ores and is well into its first full year of commercial operations.
Much of this activity has been catalyzed by the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for critical minerals. The president has issued executive orders aimed at increasing and expediting domestic minerals production in the name of national defense, and a few weeks ago, announced its intent to issue nearly $1 billion in funding aimed at scaling every stage of the critical minerals supply chain, from mining and processing to manufacturing. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at the time, “For too long, the United States has relied on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life and our national security.”
Ironically, the Trump administration is building on a foundation laid by former President Biden as part of his administration’s efforts to decarbonize the economy and expedite the energy transition. In 2022, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to give the federal government more leeway to support domestic extraction, refining, and recycling of minerals. It also invested billions of dollars from the previous year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to secure a “Made In America supply chain for critical minerals.” These initiatives helped catalyze $120 billion in private sector investments, the administration said.
While they were “motivated by radically different ideologies,” Goodman told me, the message is the same: “We care a lot about our minerals.” As he put it, “The last two administrations could not have been better orchestrated to send that message to public markets.”
Ultimately, political motivations matter far less than cash. In that vein, many companies and venture capitalists are now aligning with the current administration’s priorities. As the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz noted in an article titled “It’s Time to Mine: Securing Critical Minerals,” an F-35 fighter jet requires 920 pounds of rare earth elements, a Navy missile destroyer needs 5,200 pounds, and a nuclear-powered submarine take a whopping 9,200 pounds. Rare earths — a group of metals that form a key subset of critical minerals — are crucial components of the high-performance magnets, precision electronics, and sensors these defense systems rely on.
The military is also certainly interested in energy storage systems, including novel battery chemistries with potential to be more efficient and cost effective than the status quo. This just so happens to be the realm of many a lucrative startup, from Form Energy’s iron-air batteries to Lyten’s bet on lithium-sulfur and Peak Energy’s sodium-ion chemistry.
The Army has also gone all in on microgrids, frequently building installations that rely on solar plus storage. And batteries for use in drones, cargo planes and tactical vehicles are often simply the most practical option, given that they can operate in near silence and reduce vulnerabilities associated with refueling. “It’s much easier to get electricity into contested logistics than it is to get hydrocarbons,” Duncan Turner, a general partner at the venture capital firm SOSV, told me.
Turner has overseen the firm’s investments in minerals companies across the supply chain, a number of which focus on the extraction or refining of just one or a few minerals. For example, SOSV’s portfolio company Still Bright is developing an electrochemical process to extract copper from both high-grade ores as well as mining waste, replacing traditional copper smelting methods. The minerals recycling company XEra Energy is initially focused on reclaiming nickel from ore concentrates and used batteries, though it plans to expand into other battery materials, as well, while the metal recycling company Biometallica is developing a process to recover palladium, platinum, and rhodium from e-waste.
These startups could theoretically use their tech to go after a whole host of minerals, but Turner explained that many find the most lucrative strategy is to fine tune their processes for certain minerals in particular. “That is just a telltale sign of maturity in the market,” he told me, as companies identify their sweet spot and carve out a profitable niche.
Clea Kolster, the head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, was bullish on the potential for critical minerals investments well before the Trump administration shifted the conversation toward their role in the defense sector. “Our view was always that demand for these minerals was just going to increase,” she told me. “This administration has certainly provided a boon and validator for our thesis, but these investments were made on the basis that these would render metal production cheaper and more accessible.”
Lowercarbon was an early investor in the well-capitalized startup Lilac Solutions, first backing the company’s pursuit of a more efficient and sustainable method of lithium brine extraction in early 2020. Since then, Lilac has raised hundreds of millions in additional funding rounds — which Lowercarbon has led — and is now seeking additional capital as it plans for its first commercial lithium production plant in Utah. Lilac isn’t the firm’s only lithium bet — it’s also backing Lithios, a company developing an electrochemical method for separating lithium from brines, and Novalith, which is working on a carbon-negative process for extracting lithium from hard rock without the use of environmentally damaging acids.
Kolster admitted that in Lowercarbon’s early days, the firm “didn’t fully appreciate how significant those additional narratives would become beyond decarbonization,” pointing to critical minerals’ newly prominent role not just in defense, but also in the AI arms race. After all, no new transmission lines, transformers, gear to turn circuits on and off, or other critical grid components can be built or scaled to support the rising electricity demands of data centers without critical minerals.
Goodman told me that some generalist investors have yet to take note of this, however. “There’s large pockets of the investment community who feel like climate is out of the rotation,” he said.
“So in a way we’re experiencing a better pricing opportunity right now, access to higher quality deals.”
From here on out, he predicts we’ll see a steady stream of announcements signaling that the U.S. has secured yet another link in the minerals supply chain, which will be crucial to counter China’s global influence. “I think annually you’ll be seeing the US raise the flag and declare success on another mineral,” Goodman told me. “It might be two years after we raise the flag that a facility is actually operational. But there's going to be a cadence to us taking back our supply chain.”
On a Justice Department crackdown, net zero’s costs, and Democrats’ nuclear fears
Current conditions: Hurricane Lorena, a Category 1 storm, is threatening Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. with flooding and 80 mile-per-hour winds • In the Pacific, Hurricane Kiko strengthened to a Category 4 storm as it heads toward Hawaii • South Africa’s Northern Cape is facing extremely high fire risks.
The owners of Revolution Wind are fighting back against the stop-work order from President Donald Trump that halted construction on the offshore wind project off the coast of Rhode Island last month. On Thursday, Orsted and Skyborn Renewables filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accusing the Trump administration of causing “substantial harm” to a legally permitted project that was 80% complete. The litigation claimed that the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management “lacked legal authority for the stop-work order and that the stop-work order’s stated basis violated applicable law.”
“Revolution Wind secured all required federal and state permits in 2023, following reviews that began more than nine years ago,” the companies said in a press release. “Revolution Wind has spent and committed billions of dollars in reliance upon this fulsome review process.” The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut filed a similar complaint on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, seeking to “restore the rule of law, protect their energy and economic interests, and ensure that the federal government honors its commitments.” Analysts didn’t expect the order to hold, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, though the cost to the project’s owners was likely to rise. As I have reported repeatedly in this newsletter over the past few weeks, the Trump administration is enlisting at least half a dozen agencies in a widening attack meant to eliminate a generating technology that is rapidly growing overseas.
After the cleanup in Altadena, California.Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Department of Justice sued South California Edison on Thursday for $77 million in damages, accusing the utility of negligence that caused two deadly wildfires. Federal prosecutors in California alleged the utility failed to maintain infrastructure that ultimately sparked the Eaton fire in January, and the 2022 Fairview fire in Riverside County, The Wall Street Journal reported. The fires collectively killed about two dozen people and charred more than 42,000 acres of land. “Hardworking Californians should not pick up the tab for Edison’s negligence,” said Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. Attorney for California’s Central District, where the lawsuit was filed.
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It sure sounds like a lot of money. In a new research note released this week, the energy consultancy BloombergNEF calculated the total cost to transition the global economy off unmitigated fossil fuels by 2050 at $304 trillion. But that’s only 9% above the cost of continuing to develop worldwide energy systems on economics alone, which would result in 2.6 degrees Celsius of global warming. That margin is relatively narrow because the operating costs of cleaner technologies such as electric vehicles and renewable power generators are lower than the cost of fuel in the long term. The calculation also doesn’t account for the savings from avoided climate disasters in a net-zero scenario that halts the planet’s temperature spike at 1.7 degrees Celsius. While the cost of investing in renewables, grid infrastructure, electric vehicles, and carbon capture technology would add $45 trillion in additional investment, it’s ultimately offset by $19 trillion in annual savings from making the switch.
Microsoft has signed a series of deals that tighten the tech giant’s grip on the nascent carbon removal market. With new agreements that involve direct air capture in North American and burning garbage for energy in Oslo, Microsoft now accounts for 80% of all credits ever purchased from tech-based carbon removal projects. The company made up 92% of purchases in the first half of this year, the Financial Times reported, citing the data provider AlliedOffsets. By comparison, Amazon made up 0.7% of the market and Google comprised 1.4%.
We are still far from where carbon removal needs to be to make an impact on emissions. All the Paris Agreement-consistent scenarios modeled in the scientific literature require removing between 4 billion and 6 billion metric tons of carbon per year by 2035, and between 6 billion and 10 billion metric tons by 2050, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote recently. “For context, they estimate that the world currently removes about 2 billion metric tons of carbon per year over and above what the Earth would naturally absorb without human interference.”
At a hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the two Democrats left on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress they feared Trump would fire them if they raised safety concerns about new reactors. Matthew Marzano said the “NRC would not license a reactor” that didn’t pass safety standards, but that it’s a “possibility” the White House would oust him for withholding approval. “I think on any given day, I could be fired by the administration for reasons unknown,” Crowell told lawmakers, according to a write-up of the hearing in E&E News.
Hitachi Energy announced more than $1 billion in investments to expand manufacturing of electrical grid infrastructure in the U.S. That includes about $457 million for a new large power transformer facility in Virginia. “Power transformers are a linchpin technology for a robust and reliable electric grid and winning the AI race,” Andreas Schierenbeck, chief executive of Hitachi Energy, said in a press release. “Bringing production of large power transformers to the U.S. is critical to building a strong domestic supply chain for the U.S. economy and reducing production bottlenecks, which is essential as demand for these transformers across the economy is surging.”