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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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Secretary of Energy Chris Wright canceled 24 decarbonization grants worth $3.7 billion.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is clawing back 24 grants for projects to cut emissions from heavy industry after signaling earlier this month that he was reviewing the Biden administration’s award decisions. The total lost funding comes to just over $3.7 billion, and would have helped a wide range of companies, including those in food and beverage production, steelmaking, cement, and chemicals deploy cutting edge clean energy solutions.
The agency, however, decided that the projects “failed to advance the energy needs of the American people, were not economically viable and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” according to the announcement.
Most of the cancelled projects were part of the Industrial Demonstration Program, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act and designed to help commercialize decarbonization solutions that were past the early experimental stage, but were also not quite ready for mass deployment.
Proponents of the program found the DOE’s decision outrageous. “They’re not building an economy — they’re dismantling it and giving away the future of manufacturing,” Evan Gillespie, a partner at the advocacy group Industrious Labs, said in a statement. Canceling these projects is “handing the competitive advantage to Europe, China, Canada, and other nations that are making significant investments in clean manufacturing while leaving the U.S behind,” he added.
The Kraft Heinz Food Company, for example, was supposed to get $172 million to swap out fossil fuel-fired boilers and other heating equipment for electric heat pumps and solar thermal systems at 10 of its factories. “This project seeks to help a major American brand achieve deep decarbonization and serve as an example for other U.S. food and beverage companies to reduce emissions from process heat while reducing energy costs,” the original award from the DOE said. Diageo, the liquor conglomerate, and Kohler, the kitchen and bathroom appliance brand, were also among the awardees.
Cement production is one of the biggest sources of industrial emissions in the world, and also among the most difficult to decarbonize due to an integral chemical reaction that releases carbon into the atmosphere regardless of whether the plant burns fossil fuels. Experts aren’t sure yet what the best solution will be, and the DOE program awarded a variety of projects to test different pathways.
Heidelberg Materials, one of the largest cement companies in the world, was going to get $500 million to demonstrate the first cement plant to capture and sequester its carbon emissions in the U.S. A company called Sublime Systems that’s using an alternative chemistry and electric currents to make cement was supposed to receive $87 million to build its first commercial-scale factory in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Just last week, Sublime signed a deal to supply 623,000 metric tons of zero-carbon cement to Microsoft, in part to support the tech giant’s data center buildout. Another company called Brimstone was awarded $189 million to produce low-carbon cement alongside alumina, the base material used to make aluminum.
“Given our project's strong alignment with President Trump's priority to increase U.S. production of critical minerals, we believe this was a misunderstanding,” a spokesperson for Brimstone told me. “Brimstone's Rock Refinery represents the only economically viable way to produce the critical mineral alumina in the U.S. from U.S.-mined rocks. As the first U.S.-based alumina plant in a generation, our project — which would also make Portland cement — would clear a 'mine-to-metal' path for U.S. aluminum production, fortifying the U.S. critical mineral supply chain and creating thousands of jobs.”
Sublime also shared a statement asserting that its technology would enable the Trump administration’s priorities. “We continue our bipartisan appeal to leaders who recognize that investing in American-invented breakthrough industrial technologies can address multiple policy priorities in tandem to the benefit of Americans from all walks of life,” Sublime said. The company added that it has “prepared for the possibility of this disappointing outcome” and is “evaluating various scenarios that leave our scale-up unimpeded.”
Oil and gas companies were also hit. A $332 million grant to help Exxon switch to low-carbon hydrogen at one of its refineries was canceled, as were $540 million in grants for the energy company Calpine to install carbon capture on its natural gas plants.
“It is hugely disappointing to see these projects canceled — projects that had already progressed through a rigorous, months-long review process by technical experts at DOE,” Jessie Stolark, the executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, said in a statement. While Wright said the terminations would generate taxpayer savings, Stolark argued they were depriving Americans of economic benefits. “Every dollar invested by the American taxpayer can lead to up to $4 in economic output through additional supply and material orders, job creation, and broader economic benefits to regional economies,” she wrote, citing a Department of Energy-authored analysis.
None of the awardees responded to my inquiry as to whether they would consider pursuing legal challenges. According to the law under which the program was created, the funding was to be awarded “on a competitive basis,” based on the expected greenhouse gas emission reductions from the project and its potential to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. Additional criteria in the agency’s application process said it would evaluate projects based on the “degree to which the applicant assesses and demonstrates potential market competitiveness and sustainability for the proposed project, technology, and manufactured product(s) through market analysis and offtake agreements.”
Notably absent from the list of canceled projects is a grant for the steelmaking company Cleveland Cliffs. Earlier this month, I reported that the company was renegotiating its award under the Industrial Demonstration Program. On an earnings call, its CEO said it was abandoning plans to use clean energy and instead looking to use the funds to extend the life of its fossil fuel-fired blast furnace.
If gone unchallenged, the funding is not likely to be re-awarded to other projects. The budget bill that is currently working its way through Congress would rescind any money from the Industrial Demonstrations Program that isn’t under contract.
Especially with carbon capture tax incentives on the verge of disappearing, perhaps At One Ventures founder Tom Chi is onto something.
Technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air — a.k.a. direct air capture — has always had boosters who say it’s necessary to reach net zero, and detractors who view it as an expensive fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry. But when the typical venture capitalist looks at the tech, all they see is dollar signs. Because while the carbon removal market is still in its early stages, if you look decades down the line, a technology that can permanently remove residual emissions in a highly measurable fashion has got to be worth a whole lot, right? Right?
Not so, says Tom Chi, founder of At One Ventures and co-founder of Google’s technological “moonshot factory,” X. Bucking the dominant attitude, he’s long vowed to stay away from DAC altogether. “If you’re trying to collect carbon dioxide in the air, it’s like trying to suck all the carbon dioxide through a tiny soda straw,” Chi told me. Given that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere sits at about 0.04%, “2,499 molecules out of 2,500 are not the one you’re trying to get,” Chi said. “These are deep, physical disadvantages to the approach.”
He’s obviously not the first to realize this. DAC companies and their scientists are well aware of the challenges they face. But investors are generally comfortable taking on risk across a host of different technologies and industries on the premise that at least a few of their portfolio companies will hit it big. As such, a nascent market and challenging physics are not inherent reasons to steer clear. DAC’s potential to secure cash-rich oil and gas industry buyers is pure upside.
Most prominent climate tech venture capital firms — including Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, and Khosla Ventures — have at least one DAC company in their portfolios. At One Ventures itself has backed everything from producing oxygen on the moon (while also decarbonizing steel) to indoor solar cells and thorium-powered nuclear reactors, a hobbyhorse of techno-optimist nuclear bros and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. So the fact that Chi won’t touch DAC is no small deal.
His hesitation stems from a matter of scale.To capture that 0.04% of atmospheric carbon, many DAC companies use giant fans to pull in large volumes of air from the atmosphere, which then pass through either a solid filter or a liquid solution that chemically captures the carbon dioxide. Although some companies are pursuing alternate approaches that rely on passive air contact rather than energy-intensive fans, either way, the amount of air that reaches any DAC machine’s so-called “collection aperture” is minuscule “relative to the scale of planet Earth,” Chi told me.
He views this as the core pitfall of the technology. “Half of the [operating expense] of the system is just trying to go after a technical disadvantage that you took on from day one,” Chi said. “By comparison, nature based restorations have enormous apertures,” Chi told me. “Think about the aperture of all the forests on the planet. Think about the aperture of all the soils on the planet, all the wetlands on the planet, the ocean.” His preferred methods of carbon removal are all nature-based. “In addition, their sequestration tends to be photosynthesis-powered, which means we’re not burning natural gas or using grid electricity in order to go make that thing work.”
Nature-based solutions often raise eyebrows in the carbon removal and reduction space, though, bringing to mind highly questionable carbon offsets such as those earned via “avoided deforestation.” The inherent counterfactual — would these trees really have been cut down if we didn’t buy these credits? — is difficult to measure with any certainty, and a 2023 investigation by The Guardian found that the majority of these types of credits are essentially bogus.
This same essential question around measurability plagues everything from afforestation and reforestation to soil carbon sequestration, biochar application, and wetland restoration. It’s extremely difficult to measure how much carbon is stored — and for how long — within complex, open ecosystems. On the other hand, engineered solutions such as direct air capture or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage are simple to quantify and promise permanent storage, making them attractive to large corporate buyers and easy to incentivize via mechanisms such as the federal carbon sequestration tax credit.
When I put all this to Chi, his response was simple. “It’s not an advantage to be able to measure something that can’t solve the problem,” he told me. For a moment, it seemed as if we had hit an intellectual dead end. For now, carbon removals and reductions are mainly driven by the voluntary carbon market, where prices are based on the exact tonnage of carbon removed. Reputable buyers don’t want to be burned again by investing in difficult to quantify offsets, and the current administration certainly doesn’t seem likely to step in with nature-based removal mandates or purchasing commitments anytime soon.
Chi’s answer to this conundrum is “financial enclosure,” essentially a fancy way of saying we need to monetize the value of nature-based systems. In many cases, he admitted, we don’t quite yet know how to do that, at least in a way that benefits the common good. “We figured out how to financially enclose a forest, clear cut it in order to go make board feed and paper and pulp,” he explained. But we don’t know how to financially enclose the benefit of preserving said forest, nor many other ecosystems such as wetlands that serve as highly effective carbon sinks.
At One Ventures has backed companies that work with a variety of buyers — from national governments to mining companies and farmers — that have a financial stake in (or are legally required to care about) ecosystem preservation and restoration. “Sometimes people break nature hard enough that it becomes that obvious. And then they have to go fix it,” Chi told me. “We’re going to invest in the companies that make it possible to go do that at incredibly low cost structures.”
One portfolio company, Dendra Systems, uses robots, drones, and other automated methods to do large scale ecosystem restoration, such as replanting mangroves in parts of the world such as Myanmar and Abu Dhabi where they’ve been cleared for property development or industrial use. The governments of both countries are paying Dendra to do this after realizing that removing mangroves had catastrophic consequences —- destroying subsistence fishing, wrecking erosion breaks — that would cost more to ameliorate than simply replanting the trees.
Then there’s Dalan Animal Health, which is developing vaccines for honeybees as hives become more vulnerable to disease. While not directly focused on carbon removal, the company has successfully “financially enclosed” pollination, as industrial farmers whose crops depend on pollinators will pay for the vaccine. This helps restore healthy ecosystems that can ultimately draw down more carbon. Chi told me that insurance companies have also shown a willingness to pay for nature-based solutions that can help lessen the impact of disasters such as floods or hurricanes.
While the carbon benefits of these companies are simply a bonus, the firm has invested in one pure play removal company, Gigablue. This startup releases engineered particles into the ocean that attract carbon-absorbing phytoplankton. As the particles accumulate more plankton, they sink to the ocean floor, where the carbon is then stored. Using onsite sampling and other advanced techniques, Chi told me that this tech is “very measurable” while also having an “aperture [that] is as wide as the ocean area that we’ve sprinkled things onto.”
Though Chi dislikes the illogical nature of the voluntary carbon market — he would much prefer a “polluter pays” system where money is directed towards nature-based sequestration — he knows that with the markets we have, precise measurability is paramount. So At One Ventures is throwing money at this, too. Portfolio company Chloris Geospatial combines satellite data and machine learning to measure biomass from space and track changes over time, helping legitimize forest-based removals. And Miraterra is focused on novel sensing tech and advanced modeling that allows farmers to calculate the amount of carbon in their soil.
But even if the carbon stored in natural ecosystems never becomes quite as measurable as engineered carbon removals, Chi thinks investors, companies, or governments should still be going all in. “When your volume is so much larger, then you can even throw big error bars around your measurability and still be miles ahead,” he told me.
Many investors say they want it all. You’ll see them funding nature-based and engineered carbon removal companies alike in an effort to take a “portfolio approach” to carbon removal. Chi, unsurprisingly, thinks that’s hogwash. “It’s weasel words to be like, it’s an important part of this portfolio,” he told me. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also advocates for a diversified approach, without saying DAC itself is strictly necessary. DAC is “not going to do 1%, and it’s going to be massively more expensive than your other 99%,” Chi said. “At some point you’re going to be like, why is this in the portfolio?”
It’s certainly a more blunt assessment of the industry’s viability (or lack thereof) than I’ve heard any investor hazard before. But there may be more folks starting to come around to Chi’s perspective. With government support for DAC in question and the utility of carbon capture tax credits — which only benefit engineered removals — deeply threatened, venture funding for DAC is down over 60% from this time last year, Bloomberg reported.
Rajesh Swaminathan, a climate tech investor at Khosla Ventures told the publication that while many investors have taken bets on direct air capture, “Now, people are stepping back and saying, ‘Why didn’t I look at the economics there?’” Khosla itself is an investor in the DAC company Spiritus.
So what’s a longterm skeptic like Chi to do in this moment of doubt? As he told me, “I’m just going to keep on giving talks on it, and I know that physics is on my side.”
On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.