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Russ Vought could jeopardize the next decade of climate science. But who is he?
It is my sincere belief that, as with many aspects of governance, thinking about climate policy bores former President Donald Trump. He is not without his hobbyhorses — wind turbines are ugly bird-killers; it’s freezing in New York, so where the hell is global warming? — but on the whole, I tend to agree with the assessment that he basically believes “nothing” on climate change. Trump simply isn’t all that interested. He prefers to let the others do the thinking for him.
This isn’t a knock on Trump, per se; part of leading a bureaucracy as big and as complicated as the United States government is surrounding yourself with people who can offload some of that thinking for you. But the crucial question then becomes: Who is doing that thinking?
The answer, to a large extent, is Russ Vought.
The name might not immediately ring a bell. Biographical details of the 48-year-old career bureaucrat can be hard to find (“a native of Trumbull, Connecticut,” “the youngest of seven children,” “a die-hard Yankees fan”), giving the impression that Vought came out of nowhere. In a sense, he did: For years, Vought dealt mainly with spreadsheets as he worked first as a budget staffer for Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, then later for then-Rep. Mike Pence, and eventually the Heritage Foundation. It was Gramm, though, who gave Vought his outlook on the world: “If you do budget, you do everything.”
After a stint with the Trump transition team, Vought became deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2018, and took over entirely in 2019. At OMB, he famously held up military aid to Ukraine in what became the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. Described as “ideological in the extreme,” “adversarial” with his colleagues, and having an “aggressive personal style” — incongruous, perhaps, with his somewhat nerdy, bespectacled appearance — Vought would reportedly go too far in proposed budget cuts sometimes even for his boss.
After Biden’s win in 2020, Vought launched the Center for American Restoration, a pro-Trump think tank with the mission of renewing “a consensus of America as a nation under God,” and has otherwise kept busy with appearances on conservative-friendly talk shows on One America News Network and Fox News. Steve Bannon has approvingly dubbed him “MAGA’s bulldog,” though he rarely speaks to the mainstream press. (I received a failed delivery message in response to an email to the address listed on the website for the Center for American Restoration; other attempts to contact Vought went unanswered.)
Vought is all but assured to take up a powerful position in a potential incoming Trump cabinet. He “trained up during the first Trump administration, and he is looking to apply those skills that he learned in a second,” said Alex Witt, the senior advisor for oil and gas at Climate Power, a strategic communications group that shared its research on Vought with me.
Vought may not be the most obvious architect for the project of dismantling climate progress, however. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for the next Republican president, Vought authored the chapter on the Office of the President of the United States — hardly the most climate-y section, given that there are also chapters on reforming the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior. A flurry of new articles about Vought describe him as a Christian nationalist crusader preoccupied with fending off big government and orchestrating an expansion of presidential powers.
But just as Trump advisor Stephen Miller shaped far-right immigration policies from behind the scenes, Vought would be a hidden hand in a future administration dismantling climate progress. In his chapter in Project 2025, for example, Vought proposes moving the National Defense Strategy from under the purview of the Defense Department to the White House and its National Security Council — normal “expansion of presidential powers” stuff. But Vought goes even further, directing the NSC then to “rigorously review” the staff with an eye for “climate change … and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed force.”
Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate and Security, told me that such a proposal indicates “a misunderstanding of how connected climate hazards are to the core duties of what the military is focused on.” It could also put the U.S. armed forces on the back foot in conflicts around the world if it’s followed through. As just one example, if the military isn’t engaging with its Indo-Pacific partners “and helping those countries build resilience to climate change, then China is more than happy to step in and address that,” Sikorsky warned. At home, NSC analyses of the domestic impacts of climate change will likely come to a halt, scuttling future coordination between the military and local governments after disasters and hampering mitigation efforts around the country.
The most significant blow on the climate front, however, would come from Vought’s proposal to reinstate Schedule F, a job classification that aims to convert at least 50,000 career civil servants to “at-will” political employees. (Trump used an executive order to implement Schedule F at the very end of his term; President Biden unimplemented it soon after taking office.) The employment classification ostensibly aims to make it easier to replace “rogue” or “woke” civil servants and would-be whistleblowers, a.k.a. “the deep state,” with party-line faithful. But in the words of Vought himself, Schedule F is also necessary because Biden’s “climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
The effects of such a decision, experts told me, could range from very bad to disastrous self-sabotage. Schedule F is “designed to be a tool to purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me. In practice, that might mean firing longtime civil servants perceived as not loyal enough, or even just “creating and perpetuating a climate of fear and intimidation where people are not able or willing to speak out when they see abuse of power and other corruption happening.”
Such a scenario is concerning for employees at agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who work on climate modeling. But the expertise of the U.S. civil service is broad and deep; Schedule F could impact everyone from the economists, lawyers, and engineers who work on something like the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to the people who sit on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.
“Civil service positions are not classified as political appointees for a reason, which is so that staff, especially scientists, can do work that spans administrations because it is so fundamental to public health and welfare,” Chitra Kumar, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ managing director for climate and energy, told me in an email. The people made fireable under Schedule F, in other words, are the ones who actually know what is going on, whereas “elected officials come and go, often taking a year or more to understand the latest underlying science.”
Reimplementing and expanding Schedule F, however, is apparently one of Vought’s greatest ambitions. Earlier this year, the National Treasury Employees Union obtained documents via a Freedom of Information Act request that showed Vought’s intent to apply the status to much of OMB’s workforce in 2020. As justification for taking an implicit machete to his staff, Vought writes in Project 2025 that “it is the president’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority,” but that instead, the U.S. civil service is “all too often … carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
Ann Carlson, the former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a professor of environmental law at UCLA, strongly refutes Vought’s claim. For one thing, she told me that the great irony of the Schedule F proposal is that it would make it more difficult for the Trump administration to carry out its goals in the long run.
“Part of the problem for a conservative administration is, if you want to roll back policies that are in place, you need people who know how to do that,” Carlson pointed out. She also bristled at the suggestion that civil servants are unable to check their biases at the door: Carlson’s team at NHTSA helped put together the Biden administration’s rules to strengthen fuel economy standards, but it also worked to roll back the Obama administration’s regulations and replaced them with the SAFE standards under Trump. “I don’t actually know, for most of them, which one they preferred,” Carlson said.
Carlson wasn’t the only former political appointee I spoke with who fiercely defended the integrity of her staff. Ron Sanders, a three-year Trump appointee, so vehemently opposed Schedule F when it was briefly implemented in 2020 that he resigned as chairman of the Federal Salary Council. Today, he represents a group of Republican former national security officials who are imploring Congress to find a middle ground between the current status quo and the extreme political loyalty demanded by Schedule F.
When I read Sanders the part of Vought’s Project 2025 chapter that calls for weeding out the “radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country,” he told me that such thinking is “myopic.” “This is potentially a Republican administration coming in and finding ‘Democrats’ in place,” Sanders said. “You could say the same thing about the Biden administration, but they knew better — they knew that senior career officials appointed in the Trump administration are still politically neutral. It just happened to be a matter of timing.”
It likewise struck me as curious that Vought would push so hard for a policy that would not only hamstring the Trump administration but might also allow future Democratic presidents to carry out purges of perceived conservative government operatives.
The Biden administration has made moves to prevent Schedule F from potentially returning under a different president. Still, Spielberger from the Project on Government Oversight told me that short of a legislative fix by Congress, such actions will only delay reimplementation of the policy by “a matter of months” should Trump be reelected. The damage to climate science from four years of Schedule F, however, could be drastic.
“What we’re going to end up with is an executive branch that’s just uninformed,” Daniel Farber, the director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, stressed to me. Farber’s fear is not just that “a bunch of uninformed ideologues” would be running the show, but also that once government experts are kicked out, it will be difficult to replace them or entice them to return.
“Even after we go back to a Democratic president, you can’t wave a wand and get all those people back,” Farber said. In the first nine months of the Trump administration, for example, the EPA lost more than 700 employees — and that was due to poor morale and high turnover even without the threat of Schedule F.
Schedule F doesn’t just chase out climate-related experts from the government. It also accelerates the revolving door that allows anti-climate zealots actors in. Both the Heritage Foundation and Vought’s think tank, the Center for American Restoration, have taken money from Big Oil groups and executives. Trump has already made his own transactional assurances to the industry if it funds his return to the White House. Schedule F, meanwhile, would open up hundreds if not thousands of positions for unqualified political operatives — essentially creating a “spoils system” where the lines between government and private industry would blur more than they already do.
“Russ Vought is not the problem,” Witt, of Climate Power, told me. “The problem is Donald Trump: Donald and the GOP are bought out by Big Oil, and Vought and other bad actors are a cog in that machine.”
It’s a metaphor that works well for the federal government, too: What happens when you have 50,000 cogs, but the person you’ve deferred to run the machine has fired all the mechanics?
“You take out all that expertise, all the people who understand how the system works?” Carlson, the former NHTSA director, said. “Good luck to you.”
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.