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Who, or what, was the biggest villain of the fourth Republican debate? Vivek “The Most Obnoxious Blowhard in America” Ramaswamy would, of course, be an easy pick. So too would “the three previous Republican debates,” which were all so painfully boring that most Americans probably didn’t bother to investigate if Wednesday’s host network, News Nation, was actually a real channel. (Whadda you know, it is!).
But there was another villain, too: a shadowy threat that, you’d think from the tone on stage, imperils nothing less than American freedom, our values, and everything we love. And no, it wasn’t Donald Trump. It was, shudder, the woke climate agenda.
The topic first lurched on stage in the form of Republicans’ favorite three-letter boogeyman, ESG. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took an opportunity to brag that he pulled $2 billion in Floridian pensions from Blackrock “when they did the ESG.”
“This ESG,” he went on, “they call it ‘environment, social, governance’ … they want to use economic power to impose a left-wing agenda on this country. They want basically to change society without having to go through the constitutional process.”
But that boogeyman doesn’t look quite as scary when you turn the lights on. While it’s true that DeSantis targeted ESG as part of his crusade against “woke capitalism,” Bloomberg noted in January that
…[t]he Florida State Board of Administration — which oversees roughly $180 billion in pension money — didn’t hold investments labeled as ESG when DeSantis ramped up his campaign last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Even after the state’s treasury said it would pull $2 billion from BlackRock amid DeSantis’s criticism, the world’s largest asset manager still oversees $12.9 billion for the state’s retirement funds.
Okay, well, the nefarious climate agenda must be hiding elsewhere? Sure enough, a little later in the debate, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley alleged that DeSantis is beholden to Chinese companies like “JinkoSolar,” which he supposedly gave “$2 million in subsidies.”
Sounds ominous! But a closer look also revealed the facts to be a little less exciting: “JinkoSolar predates DeSantis,” PolitiFact explained after Haley tried a similar line of attack during a November appearance on Fox & Friends. Besides, “state governments typically lack the authority to bar an established business from making operational decisions, unless those businesses are breaking the law” and “JinkoSolar hasn’t been charged with a crime.” PolitiFact rated the whole attack as “false.”
Reference to the dark conspiracy of the climate agenda surfaced a third and final time during the debate in the form of Ramaswamy’s closing remarks. Ramaswamy has long railed against what he calls the “climate change agenda,” presumably climate policy, calling it a “hoax.” But he used his final minutes on the mic before a national audience on Wednesday to warn that it’s also a false idol. “If you thought COVID was bad, what’s coming next with this climate agenda is far worse!” he insisted. “We should not be bending the knee to this new religion! That’s what it is, a substitute for a modern religion! We are flogging ourselves! And losing our modern way of life! Bowing to this new god of climate! And that will end on my watch!”
“Thank you. Ambassador Haley?” Megyn Kelly transitioned, evidently unruffled.
Admittedly, it’s hard to take Ramaswamy’s alarm (or, well, Ramaswamy himself) seriously. But for those watching closely — which, again, it’s more than understandable if you’re not! — a clear pattern is beginning to emerge. Republican candidates are attempting to divorce the actual climate agenda from the “cLiMAte AgENda,” a made-up specter they can scare their base with, the same way they previously weaponized and rendered meaningless words like “critical race theory” and “woke.”
But if that doesn’t frighten you, you know what is really spooky? The Iowa caucuses are less than six weeks away.
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A conversation with Dustin Mulvaney, professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University
Today’s conversation is with Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University. Mulvaney is a social scientist who spent much of his time before January 2025 advocating for more considerate and humane renewable energy development. Then Moss Landing happened. Mulvaney – who was there at Moss Landing the first day – is now obsessed with the myriad safety concerns laden in large-scale utility battery storage and what plans were in place to deal with the fire. His reasoning? A failure to grapple with safety concerns could undermine public trust in battery storage and make a transition away from fossil fuels more difficult.
The following is an abridged version of our conversation, which was the interview that first prompted me to investigate the mystery of the health concerns surrounding the fire.
Why are you so concerned about what safety plan was in place before the Moss Landing battery fire?
Three o’clock was when the battery started smoking. The giant fire doesn’t happen until six o’clock and there were reporters on scene saying, the smoke’s gone. Then all of the sudden: boom. Just blows up, big time.
They didn’t evacuate the neighborhood until six. The neighborhood should’ve been evacuated at three when the smoke started.
Wait – they didn’t evacuate the neighborhood until three hours after the fire?
It depends what you mean by fire. There weren’t flames the first few hours. From the planning side, they should’ve at least been notified they would be evacuated if the fire got worse.
That’s part of the problem. You’ve got all these people looking around at this gigantic fire and that’s scary. And on the monitoring part, there should be a plan for how to monitor the fire. How come no one flew a drone into the cloud of smoke to look for whatever’s in there to just get a sense? And they were checking for hydrofluoric acid all around but they were all at ground level. It just feels like they weren’t prepared.
Why does it concern you that they were only checking for that chemical at ground level?
We had an inversion that night and when we get a little inversion off the bay, the air is really clean and clear. I got pretty close to the fire that night. I got as close as the police would let me go. And I was breathing clean air at ground level. I want to say I was a mile away.
So what do you think was most missing from a regulatory standpoint here? What should’ve been done that wasn’t done at a state level?
If you think about it, the pipeline explosion killed all those people in San Bruno before the California Public Utilities Commission said maybe we should regulate pipelines a little better, and then burned down cities with hooks that were 100 years old from power lines and [said] maybe we should do something better on power lines. To me it feels like the CPUC is the one who has been dragging their feet on all of this.
Because they’re behind on planning?
The CPUC is in charge of safety. It’s part of CPUC’s job to make sure that pipelines don’t explode and transmission lines don’t catch fire.
I agree that we need to be safer, but there’s some pretty serious urgency to build a lot more of these batteries, fast, no?
So, the analogy that I was trying to go with was that when CPUC doesn’t do its job, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has threatened to come in. When pipeline explosions happen and if CPUC doesn’t do its job–
So do you want a Trump administration FERC to step in?
Absolutely not, that is not what I am saying. I’m not advocating for that. No way.
It’s the question of where is everybody? The CPUC should’ve stepped in and implemented regulations immediately. Maybe we’d see something different here. Maybe someone goes in and inspects that battery facility and sees we need corrugated metal from Home Depot.
This is going to get worse. I’m sure if there’s anybody with battery storage in a building like Moss Landing they are now being asked, I’m sure their insurers are asking, where’s your thermal runaway certification for that facility?
The culture wars are threatening one of the few bipartisan areas of climate policy.
Carbon capture has always been contentious, but its biggest critics have traditionally been climate activists on the left. Now, in an unexpected twist, it seems to be getting caught up in the same conservative climate culture war that has overwhelmed electric stoves and ESG investing.
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, took to social media this week to castigate the Republican supermajority in his state’s legislature for hosting a hearing on a bill about carbon sequestration. “Carbon sequestration is a scam!” he said in a pre-recorded video. “It’s part of climate ideology, and it should not be in law in the state of Florida, certainly should not be the work of a Republican supermajority.”
The video was uncanny. DeSantis sounded like the ideological activists he thought he was attacking. The idea of capturing carbon from industrial plants and storing it underground has long held bipartisan appeal among policymakers — attractive to Republicans in oil and gas states that want to keep those industries in business, and to Democrats as a way to reach across the aisle on climate solutions
The Florida bill in question isn’t just about carbon capture technology. It would create a carbon sequestration task force to make recommendations for how the state can increase carbon uptake in the environment — in trees, soils, and the ocean — in addition to using equipment to capture it and store it underground. These kinds of initiatives have long been popular with Republican policymakers, as well, in no small part because they can be pursued without talking about fossil fuels at all. During Trump’s first term, he championed the then-popular idea of planting a trillion trees as a climate solution.
In the video, DeSantis mischaracterizes the bill as calling for “injecting carbon into our soil, aquifers, and even our ocean floor,” conflating nature-based and technological storage solutions and making the legislation sound all the more threatening.
The video is not the only recent example of a prominent Republican coming out against carbon capture and sequestration. In March, Scott Perry, a Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania, co-sponsored the “45Q Repeal Act” with Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California. The bill proposes killing the 45Q tax credit, a subsidy that pays between $60 and $180 for every ton of carbon pumped underground. The amount depends on from where the carbon was captured and whether it is simply sequestered underground or used to pump oil out of aging wells, a process called enhanced oil recovery.
Khanna and other Democrats have introduced bills to kill 45Q each year for the past several years, arguing that it was primarily subsidizing more oil production to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, fueling climate change rather than slowing it. But this is the first time a Republican has signed on as a co-sponsor. Perry painted the bill as a way to “reduce overregulation and fraud” and to help pay for the tax cuts that Trump has asked for. “The 45Q tax credit subsidizes technologies that serve no purpose beyond distorting energy markets,” states a press release from Perry’s office.
“It’s one of these, what we would call Baptist/Bootleggers type of coalitions,” David Reiner, a political scientist and professor of technology policy at the University of Cambridge, told me. “The people who hate climate change and the people who hate the idea that the way of solving climate change would be to engage the oil and gas industry.”
The environmental news outlet DeSmog has also reported on a growing conservative backlash to carbon capture in Canada, with a far-right group called Canada Proud running anti-carbon capture ads to its more than 500,000 followers on Facebook. “Carbon capture is billed as a green technology that stops carbon from entering the atmosphere,” the ads said. “But is it really good for the environment? As it turns out, not really.” Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and Food and Water Watch have been saying the same thing for years.
The rhetoric around carbon capture tends to oversimplify complex challenges into absolute statements. Critics say that carbon capture “doesn’t work” or is a “false solution.” Advocates say it’s “proven” technology that’s already avoided millions of tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere.
It’s true that to date, captured carbon has mostly been used to get more oil out of the ground. Oil and gas companies have thus far benefited more than people or the environment, despite their exaggerated advertisements saying otherwise. For many potential use cases, it’s far easier and cheaper to use renewable energy than capture and sequester carbon. The technology is expensive, and without heavy subsidies, it either isn’t economic or would increase energy costs. There are some cases, however, such as removing carbon from the atmosphere or decarbonizing cement production, where it could be one of the best solutions. The technology’s most progressive proponents often argue that the criticisms of carbon capture can be addressed with better policy. But there are no powerful political coalitions pushing for a different vision.
On the contrary, the most powerful proponents of carbon capture are pushing for more generous subsidies. In February, John Barasso, a Senator from Wyoming, introduced “The Enhancing Energy Recovery Act” with six Republican co-sponsors. The bill would expand 45Q so that all carbon sequestration projects, whether they increase oil production or not, qualify for the same amount of tax credit.
Reiner, the political scientist, mostly dismissed the significance of the DeSantis video to the broader policy debate around carbon capture. “Ron DeSantis doesn’t like carbon capture. Well, who cares?” he told me. There’s not much going on with carbon capture in Florida anyway. “The way the Senate works is it vastly over-represents the western, resource-rich states, all of whom have been very enthusiastic supporters of this,” Reiner said. “It’s very easy for Ron DeSantis to posture on this topic. It’s much harder to imagine that would gain a lot of traction in the Senate Republican leadership.”
At the same time, Reiner said the Florida governor’s comments reflect this broader upheaval happening in areas where there once appeared to be consensus. For example, after Trump was elected, there appeared to be relative agreement that the Inflation Reduction Act was safe because of how much money it was sending to Republican districts. But then the Trump administration came in and immediately began trying to shut down many of the law’s grant programs — a course of action few had predicted, mainly because it’s likely illegal for the president to end grant programs without permission from Congress.
Now, Republicans in Congress are considering axing some of the law’s most beneficial clean energy tax credits to pay for Trump’s tax cut package. Billion-dollar mega-projects to capture carbon directly from the air in Texas and Louisiana have shown up on lists floating around the Hill of programs to kill.
Perhaps more striking than the DeSantis video was a re-tweet of it by Wayne Christian, a Republican on the Texas Railroad Commission. The Commission is a state body that regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas, but whose elected members regularly receive the majority of their campaign donations from the companies they regulate. “You’re right [Governor DeSantis]!” Christian wrote. “Carbon Capture & Sequestration is no different than Wind/Solar subsidies. CCUS is Big Oil placating the Left & taking taxpayer dollars to do so. Energy policies should be meritorious & about consumers.”
Apple shares fell 9% Thursday — not surprising, iPhones are largely made in China, puttingthem soon behind a 65% tariff. Nike (down 14.5%) and Lululemon’s (down 9.5%) supply chains are now behind the formidable 46% tariff onVietnam. But why is Vistra, which owns dozens of coal, gas, nuclear and renewable power plants in California, Texas, and along the East Coast, down 15%? Constellation, whose portfolio includes several nuclear plants, down 11%? GE Vernova, whose gas turbines are sold out until almost the end of the decade, down 10%? Some of the best performing stocks of 2024 are now some of the biggest laggards.
The biggest reason isn’t because natural gas or uranium or coal suddenly got more expensive (although uranium imports from Canada do face a 10% tariff). It’s because of anxiety about what the tariffs will do to economic growth — and electricity demand growth as a result.
The tariffs announced on Wednesday will be a major hit to the country’s economic trajectory according to almost every non-White House economist that’s looked at them. The Yale Budget Lab estimated that the April 2 tariffs alone would bring down GDP growth by half a percentage point, while Trump’s tariffs combined would bring down growth by 0.9 percentage points this year. Morgan Stanley economists echoed that finding in a note to clients Thursday. “Policy changes will weigh meaningfully on growth,” they wrote. “Downside risks will be larger if these tariffs remain in place.”
“Economic growth and energy consumption are pretty closely linked,” Aurora Energy Research managing director Oliver Kerr told me. “An economic slowdown tends to result in less demand for power overall. That's what the market is probably reacting to today.”
The downturn in power stocks also indicates that the market is not expecting any reindustrialization of America due to the high tariffs to happen in the near term. If it did, power producers might be in better shape, as factories are major consumers of electricity.
“Tariffs, in theory, could be a part of an economic policy arsenal to boost domestic production,” Kerr said. But without domestic incentives like those included in the Inflation Reduction Act or the Chips and Science Act, “it’s a tough case to make for why all of these factories should start opening all across the Midwest.”
Also lurking in the background is the same force that’s been driving the market performance of any company that owns substantial power capacity — especially if it’s clean firm, like nuclear, or dispatchable, like natural gas: enthusiasm around artificial intelligence. The power producers, the turbine manufacturers, and the chip designers were high flyers throughout 2024 thanks to optimism about a multi-hundred-billion dollar buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure and data centers.
That optimism has flagged of late thanks to a series of reports from brokerage TD Cowen finding that Microsoft was shaving back some of its data center commitments. Now, Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft “has pulled back on data center projects around the world, suggesting the company is taking a harder look at its plans to build the server farms powering artificial intelligence and the cloud.” The company has also “halted talks for, or delayed development” for data centers from Wisconsin to Indonesia, the Bloomberg report said.
That’s bad news for the companies like Vistra, GE Vernova, and Constellation that have ridden the wave of expected demand to stock market glory. “The main constraint that we see for AI load growth is power,” Kerr told me. But if there’s less load growth coming, then there’s less power we’ll need. Better start building some factories soon.