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As blue states double down on renewables, a backlash is growing in red states.
The Inflation Reduction Act was the star of the show in statehouses across the United States this year. As state leaders wrapped up their legislative sessions, many not only tightened their own climate plans, but delivered an encore to the IRA by passing policies to maximize their share of the new federal clean energy funding.
But the applause hasn’t been universal. In a few key Republican-led legislatures, Biden’s climate maneuvers have produced a backlash. Lawmakers pushed through bills that could make cutting emissions a lot harder, making the map of U.S. climate policy start to look as polarized as that of abortion rights or gun control laws.
“There has been a tendency to think about the energy transition as almost automatic when the cost of clean energy technologies come down,” Matto Mildenberger, a political scientist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, told me. “But politics is a really important dimension that's often missed.”
Let’s look at a few examples. Back in February, Minnesota passed a law requiring the state’s utilities to use 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040. Democrats had just taken over the legislature, and they were just warming up. In April they created a $156 million “competitiveness fund” to help agencies and cities compete for the IRA’s clean energy programs. And last week, Democratic Governor Tim Waltz signed two additional laws, one earmarking funding for heat pumps and electric vehicles, and the other creating a new sales tax to support public transit.
Democrats took a similar approach in Colorado, passing new tax credits for many of the same technologies that the IRA funds to try and attract as much federal money into its economy as possible. Coloradans are now eligible for a $7,500 EV tax credit that can be stacked on the federal credit for a juicy $15,000 incentive.
Meanwhile, New York passed the first state-level ban on natural gas in new buildings in the country. Policymakers there also directed a state-run utility to start building renewable energy projects, taking advantage of a little-known provision in the IRA that enables public entities and nonprofits to cash in on federal tax credits.
But in other states, electeds are enacting what you could call anti-climate policies. Montana’s Republican Governor Greg Gianforte recently signed a law that bars state agencies from even considering greenhouse gas emissions when conducting environmental reviews for major projects. The legislature there also passed measures preempting local governments from requiring new buildings to be solar panel or EV-ready, and from placing any restrictions on the use of natural gas. At least 20 other states have enacted similar natural gas ban preemptions in recent years. A new anti-climate copycat bill also spread to a few states this year — Ohio and Tennessee each passed laws classifying natural gas as a source of clean energy.
In Texas, the Republican-controlled legislature is contemplating bills to publicly fund a fleet of new natural gas plants, while placing new, onerous regulations on wind and solar projects. Texas currently produces more wind and solar power than any other state, thanks to lax permitting requirements and an abundance of wind, sun, and undeveloped land. Now, lawmakers want developers of new wind and solar farms — as well as owners of existing projects — to do additional environmental reviews, get new approvals, and pay higher fees. Wind farms would have to be built at least 3,000 feet from neighboring property lines. The rules would not apply to fossil fuel plants.
Though the bill never made it out of committee, a group of Republican lawmakers in Wyoming even sought to “phase out” electric vehicle sales to protect the state’s oil and gas industry. The bill’s lead sponsor later said he supports electric vehicles, and was just trying to send a message to California, which made plans to eventually ban gas-powered vehicles last August.
And while Georgia is often held up as a leader in building a new clean economy, having attracted more clean energy investments since the IRA passed than any other state, Republican lawmakers there recently enacted a tax on public electric vehicle charging.
None of this is particularly surprising or new. To some extent, climate and clean energy policy has long followed party lines. As political scientist Leah Stokes documents in her book Short Circuiting Policy, states like Texas and Ohio have a history of enacting anti-climate policies that slowed the growth of renewables. Those were in large part driven by special interest groups backed by utilities and the fossil fuel industry.
Mildenberger said these efforts are ramping up now because the IRA has made the threat to these industries much more significant. “Increasingly, as some of these technologies are no longer cost competitive in a pure market competition framework, they need to use policy as a rearguard action to try and maintain their market share.”
There is evidence that at least some of these policies, like defining natural gas as clean energy and preempting any bans on the fuel, trace back to special interest groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the American Gas Association. What’s new is a push to turn these issues into culture wars by painting natural gas use as a matter of freedom or identity. Republican lawmakers have described a rash of anti-ESG bills, which also have roots with industry groups, as a crackdown on “woke” investing.
But Hanna Breetz, a political scientist at Arizona State University told me it would be a mistake to attribute the trend purely to industry influence or the usual reactionary politics. That view overlooks two other very real factors that she sees contributing to an increasingly polarized environment. One is that people in rural states are legitimately concerned about what a decarbonized future means for them in terms of land use and extraction. They are going to bear the brunt of landscape impacts from vast new solar and wind farms and lithium mines.
The second is genuine risks to reliability from a grid powered by increasing amounts of renewables and batteries that’s also serving an increasing number of electric appliances. “There are some very serious concerns that have yet to be dealt with, particularly in the face of climate change and weather-related issues,” said Breetz. She pointed to a recent report warning of blackouts in some parts of the country this summer, which highlighted diminished capacity from natural gas and coal plants as one potential cause. “I think there's a lot less ideological opposition within utilities than many people assume, and that they are scared to death about a lot of these reliability concerns.”
It’s hard to untangle the role of each of these components — industry influence, party politics, land use concerns, and technical challenges — when they all feed into one another. The effect could intensify as more and more people experience a bad blackout or are faced with a solar farm being built in a place they hold dear.
But also, it might not. If all goes according to Biden’s plan, the IRA will be a countervailing force that brings new jobs and economic growth to areas where political support for clean energy is in short supply. The majority of clean energy project announcements since the IRA was passed are in states like Georgia, Arizona, and South Carolina. Think of the new battery belt emerging in the South, or how many renewable energy projects are popping in Republican-held congressional districts.
“In three or five years that might make some of the extreme rhetoric and policy positions that we're seeing right now on the Republican side of the aisle a little bit more challenging to hold,” said Mildenberger. “My view is that even in some of the more fossil fuel intensive parts of the United States, the question of the energy transition is not if, but when. And to help manage the global climate crisis, that ‘when’ needs to be really soon.”
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On a copper mega merger, California’s solar canal, and Bahrain’s deep-sea mining bet
Current conditions: Cooler air is dropping temperatures on the Pacific Coast and Nevada by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit • Hurricane Kiko lost intensity and passed north of Hawaii • The volcano Mount Semeru in East Java, Indonesia, is erupting today for the 19th time this week, spewing an ash plume nearly 2,000 feet high.
The Trump administration disbanded a group of five climate contrarians brought together to write the Department of Energy’s controversial report challenging the scientific consensus on the severity of climate change, CNN’s Ella Nilsen reported. In a lawsuit last month, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists alleged that the formation of the group of researchers — the University of Alabama’s John Christy and Roy Spencer, the Hoover Institution’s Steven Koonin, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry, and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick — violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s public disclosure rules by failing to promptly disclose its formation and make its meeting and notes available to the public. The litigation also accused the Trump administration of breaking the law by assembling a government working group deliberately designed to represent a one-sided argument, which is prohibited under the same statute. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright confirmed in a September 3 letter that the group was dissolved. Still, the Energy Department has not retracted its assessment.
Wright’s regular messages on X about climate science and clean energy have drawn blowback and corrections appended by followers as Community Notes. “I can’t claim to know what’s happening in Wright’s mind. But I do know what’s happening with his policy — and this weak messaging, in my view, points to the intractability of Wright’s position,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote on Tuesday. Wright is both the chief lieutenant in Trump’s culture war against those who advocate for a transition to clean energy and the mouthpiece of the president’s effort to convince the country he’s fulfilling his promise to curb energy prices. Wright’s social media behavior, however, “is not how someone acts when he is focused on energy affordability above all,” Robinson wrote.
The price of copper hit a record high this summer as the Trump administration slapped 50% tariffs on imports of the globally-traded metal needed for new electrical infrastructure and growth in demand far eclipsed any associated increase in supply. Now a mega-merger of two mining giants is set to capture a larger share of the fortunes generated by the new copper boom. Anglo American and Teck Resources inked a deal to merge, creating a mining behemoth with a combined market value of more than $53 billion. It’s one of the largest-ever deals in the mining industry. If completed, the tie-up will form one of the world’s top-five biggest copper producers, with mines stretching from the bottom of the Western Hemisphere in Chile to the top in Canada producing some 1.2 million metric tons of metal per year. More than 70% of that combined production would be copper.
“The energy industry has been dealing with the copper issue for years,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in March, when prices were even lower. “More specifically, it’s worrying about how domestic and global production will be able to keep up with what forecasters anticipate could be massive demand.” This deal doesn’t necessarily quell those concerns, since, as The Wall Street Journal noted, it “also illustrates a challenge for bolstering commodity supply: Many miners figure it is easier and cheaper to buy rather than build mines.”
Wright’s posts about climate change and solar energy may be drawing criticism. But his agency’s support for nuclear energy has largely won praise across the political spectrum. That now includes fusion. On Wednesday, the Energy Department announced $134 million in funding for two programs designed to boost U.S. efforts to harness the type of atomic reaction that powers the sun, long considered the holy grail of clean energy. The agency pledged to give out a combined $128 million through the Fusion Innovative Research Engine to seven teams working on fusion energy science and technology. Another $6.1 million is set to flow to 20 projects through the Innovation network for Fusion Energy program to improve research in materials science, laser technologies, and fusion modeling. “DOE is unleashing the next frontier of American energy,” Wright said in a press release. “Fusion power holds the promise of limitless, reliable, American-made energy—and programs like INFUSE and FIRE ensure our innovators have the tools, talent, and partnerships to make it a reality.”
As I reported in this newsletter last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinout Commonwealth Fusion just raised one of the biggest venture rounds of the year. In July, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported on $10 million funding for the Seattle-area startup Avalanche Energy, which promises to build “micro” fusion reactors.
Shadeless land is a constraint on solar power’s expansion, inspiring high-profile projects in Portugal, Brazil, and China to build vast floating panel arrays on dammed bodies of water, a whole sector of the industry called agrovoltaics that marries farming and solar power production, and recent studies forecasting huge potential to line highways with panels. A new 1.6-megawatt solar installation in California that just came online highlights another option involving a manmade waterway: covering canals. Project Nexus, a $20 million state-funded pilot, has transformed stretches of the Turlock Irrigation District's canal system throughout California's Central Valley into what Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci called “hubs of clean electricity generation in a remote area where cotton, tomatoes, almonds, and hundreds of other crops are grown.”
President Donald Trump stirred a global controversy this year with his executive order directing the U.S. to stockpile minerals obtained through deep-sea mining, an as-yet nonexistent industry still awaiting a global agreement on international regulations that would create a global legal framework for commercially harvesting nodules from as deep as 20,000 feet down. As I previously reported in this newsletter, countries that opposed Trump’s push to unilaterally kick off mining without worldwide agreement on how to regulate the activities ended up siding with China, which opposed the U.S. move, along with conservationists, who say it risked damaging one of the last wildernesses untouched by humans. Yet this week Bahrain placed a big bet on the future of U.S. efforts, the Financial Times reported. The Gulf kingdom and U.S ally backed the California startup Impossible Metals’ plan to explore an area of ocean largely controlled by Beijing. Bahrain is also the first Middle Eastern country to sponsor the measure to legalize deep-sea mining at the obscure United Nations-linked agency, the Jamaica-headquartered International Seabed Authority. The investment is more proof that, as Katie wrote this week, “everybody wants to invest in critical mineral startups.”
A view of the Russell Glacier in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where I visited in 2017. Alexander C. Kaufman
Anyone who has been to northern Greenland can tell you how eerily lifeless the ice cap can seem when you’re looking out to a boundless horizon of treeless frozen expanse. But in what looks like dirt spotted in ice cores taken from the outer edges of the polar cap are diatoms — single-celled algae with outer walls made of glass. Far from a new presence, these non-plant photosynthetic organisms were long believed to be entombed and dormant in ice. But researchers from Stanford University extracted diatoms from ice cores and recreated their environments in a lab. The scientists discovered that diatoms travel through the ice via narrow channels as thin as a strand of hair. “This is not 1980s-movie cryobiology,” Manu Prakash, associate professor of bioengineering in the Schools of Engineering and Medicine and senior author of the paper, said in a press release. “The diatoms are as active as we can imagine until temperatures drop all the way down to -15 [degrees Celsius], which is super surprising.”
On Rick Perry’s loan push, firefighters’ mask rules, and Europe’s heat pump problems
Current conditions: The Garnet Fire has scorched nearly 55,000 acres in Sierra National Forest, east of Fresno, California, and now threatens 2,000-year-old sequoia trees • Hurricane Kiko is losing intensity as it reaches Hawaii • Tropical Storm Tapah has made landfall over China, forcing evacuations and school closures.
U.S. emissions cuts under Trump's current policy versus the Biden-era policies. Rhodium Group
The United States’ output of planet-heating pollution is on track to continue double-digit declines through 2040, even if the Trump administration successfully eliminates all the policies it’s targeting to cut greenhouse gas emissions. That’s according to the latest assessment from the Rhodium Group consultancy. A new report published Wednesday morning found that U.S. emissions are set to decline by 26% to 43% relative to 2005 levels in 2040. While that sounds like a significant drop, it’s a “meaningful shift” away from Rhodium’s estimates last year, which showed a steeper decline of 38% to 56%. In all, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, the Trump administration’s policies could halve U.S. emissions cuts.
“Perhaps the only bright side in the report is a section on household energy costs,” Emily added. “The loss of tax credits for renewables and home efficiency upgrades will raise electricity bills compared to the projections in last year’s report. But despite that, Rhodium expects overall household energy costs to decrease in the coming decades — in all scenarios. That’s primarily due to the switch to electric vehicles, which lowers transportation costs for EV drivers and puts downward pressure on the cost of gasoline for everyone else.”
Fermi America, the company former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry founded to build one of the world’s biggest data center complexes in Texas, plans to push the Department of Energy for loans to finance its project, E&E News reported. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission for its initial public offering on Monday, the developer laid out its vision for a 5,263-acre gas and nuclear complex in Armadillo, Texas, on land owned by the Texas Tech University. The company said it was in “pre-approval” process with the Energy Department’s loan office, which it hoped would “finance key components” of its energy infrastructure. The company has filed an application for up to four Westinghouse nuclear reactors at the site, which federal regulators confirmed they’re reviewing. In his executive orders on nuclear power in May, Trump directed the Energy Department to approve at least 10 new large-scale reactors. “We believe the Trump Administration’s renewed focus on expedited permitting and the expansion of nuclear infrastructure in the United States presents a favorable backdrop for Fermi to replicate its business model,” the filing said.
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Solar developer Pine Gate Renewables has started consulting advisers to deal with liquidity constraints amid the Trump administration’s push to derail the clean energy industry, Bloomberg reported. The company is working with Lazard Inc. and Latham & Watkins. It has some high-profile backers with loans from Brookfield Asset Management and Carlyle Group, while Blackstone provided preferred equity.
The move to enlist advisers is a sign of the challenges ahead for renewables. With new restrictions on imported solar panels coming into force, solar prices could soon rise. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in April, that could erode solar’s price advantage over gas. With tariffs staying in place and tax credits going away, Morgan Stanley analysts warned that power purchase agreement prices for solar could go up as high as $73. That’s just a few dollars off from the cost of natural gas.
For decades, the U.S. government banned wildfire fighters from wearing masks that officials deemed too cumbersome, allowing only bandannas that offer no protection against toxins in wildfire smoke. But the Forest Service proposed new guidance Monday acknowledging for the first time that masks can protect firefighters against harmful particles in the smoke, The New York Times reported. The move came as part of a series of safety reforms meant to improve conditions for firefighters. In its reversal, the agency said it has now stockpiled some 80,000 N95 masks and will include them in standard equipment packs for all large fires.
Keeping firefighters employed has been difficult as blazes grow with each passing year. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote last year, “retirements and defections from skill-based work like firefighting are especially damaging because with every senior departure goes the kind of on-the-job expertise that green new hires can’t replace. But that’s if there are new hires in the first place. Rumors abound that the agencies are struggling to fill their openings even this late in the training cycle, with a known vacancy rate of 20% in the Forest Service force alone.” As I reported last week in this newsletter, the Trump administration’s arrest of immigrant firefighters battling the largest blaze in Washington last month has spurred blowback from lawyers who say the move jeopardized the effort to contain the disaster.
After booming in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European heat pump sales are slumping. It’s part of what one of the world’s largest manufacturers of the appliances called a “structural problem,” as demand dropped to a third of previous projections. In an interview with the Financial Times, Daikin president Naofumi Takenaka said orders for heat pumps have fallen as the economy has weakened and subsidies have decreased. “When we compare the market demand we had projected for 2025 at the time to the current market, it has stopped at roughly one-third of that, so it will take three to five years to return to such levels,” Takenaka said, speaking at Daikin’s headquarters in Osaka. “This is a structural problem.”
Beaked whales are considered one of the least understood mammals in the world due to their cryptic behavior and distribution in offshore waters, diving deeper than any other mammals on record and going below the surface for more than two hours. But scientists at Brazil’s Instituto Aqualie, Juiz de Fora Federal University, Mineral Engenharia e Meio Ambiente, and Santa Catarina State University set out to record the elusive whales. By doing so, they identified at least three different beaked whale species. “The motivation for this research arose from the need to expand knowledge on cetacean biodiversity in Brazilian waters, with particular attention to deep-diving species such as beaked whales,” author Raphael Barbosa Machado said in a press release.
Rob and Jesse riff on the state of utility regulation in America — and how to fix it.
Electricity is getting more expensive — and the culprit, in much of the country, is the poles and wires. Since the pandemic, utility spending on the “last mile” part of the power grid has surged, and it seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
How can we fix it? Well, we can start by fixing utility regulation.
On today’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why utility regulation sucks and how to make it better. In Europe and other parts of the world, utilities are better at controlling their cost overruns. What can the U.S. learn from their experience? Why is it so hard to regulate electricity companies? And how should the coming strains of electrification, and climate change affect how we think about the power grid? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: This is, I think, exactly where the wonky habit of referring to this as “T&D,” or transmission and distribution —
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, we should split those.
Meyer: — simply because it’s a part of people’s bills, is actually driving the misnomer, because it allows renewable opponents — like the current administration, like officials in the current administration to say, Oh, well, the transmission and distribution section, the wire is part of the grid, is the surging part of electricity costs, this is driven by renewables. And that kind of does cohere to a mental model people might have of, oh, you have to build a lot of solar farms everywhere, or, oh, you have to build a lot of wind farms everywhere. They’re distributed over the landscape, unlike a single big power plant or something, and therefore that is driving up transmission spending.
And indeed, for renewables, as Jesse was saying, you do have to build more transmission. But where you look at the actual increase in prices is coming from in that T&D section of the bill, it is not at all that story. It’s all coming from distribution.
Jenkins: It’s certainly not coming from long-distance transmission because we’re not building any long-distance transmission, right?
And that’s the other big problem, is we have not been building transmission at anywhere near the pace that we have historically during periods when demand was growing rapidly to tap into the best resources around the country. But also, then, we should be, if we were to try to tap into American renewable energy resources that could lower consumer costs. The transmission we are building is mostly also local, short-distance, reliability-related upgrades that the transmission utilities are able to build with much less regulatory oversight.
Mentioned:
Rob on how electricity got so expensive
Matthew Zeitlin on Trump’s electricity price problem
Ofgem’s price cap
Previously on Shift Key: How to Talk to Your Friendly Neighborhood Public Utility Regulator
Jesse’s upshift (plus one more); Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.