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It’s not the pipeline. It’s the power lines.
At first glance, the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling seems pretty good for the climate.
Most importantly, it preserves the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s flagship climate law. That alone is a monumental victory, cementing Biden’s legacy (for now) and allowing his administration to continue its experiment with green industrial policy.
When climate advocates have spoken against the deal, they’ve focused their ire on the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 304-mile conduit that will link West Virginia’s booming natural-gas fields to the rest of the country. The deal essentially approves the pipeline and exempts it from judicial oversight, all but ensuring its eventual completion. Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, won the White House’s support for the pipeline when he agreed to the IRA last year.
Yet despite the chatter, the pipeline was not, in fact, the most important climate concession exacted in negotiations. The deal also made a number of changes to federal permitting law, especially the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. These changes have been described as relatively small, common-sense reforms to the federal process — and in some cases they are. But they also represented critical leverage that Democrats just lost.
Democrats might have secured many other objectives in the debt-ceiling talks, including minimal cuts to some federal programs and a potential expansion of food stamps. But the deal’s permitting reforms are an uneven trade in which Democrats gave up much more than they gained and made virtually no progress on one of their biggest goals: making it easier to build long-distance power lines. When Congress revisits permitting reform in the next few months — as Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has promised – Democrats will find that they have little room to bargain.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires that the federal government conduct an environmental study before it does much of anything. It also sets the rules by which the government decides whether to approve large-scale infrastructure. If a state wants to build a new highway with federal funds, it must apply to the government, which then runs a “NEPA process” to determine whether to grant funding. Virtually every major government project — whether a new mass-transit hub or an offshore wind farm — requires a NEPA study and a NEPA process.
Republicans have long wanted to tinker with NEPA. But while NEPA was once widely understood by progressives as a bedrock of federal environmental law, some on the left have recently become more open to reforming it. Fighting climate change will require building a lot of new infrastructure, they have argued, and NEPA could slow down that process. At the same time, virtually all Democrats want to simplify the process of building new long-distance power lines, which will lower electricity prices while ushering more renewables onto the grid. If America doesn’t double its rate of new transmission construction, then 80% of the IRA’s carbon reductions will be squandered, according to Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor.
So a trade of sorts took shape: Democrats would open up NEPA, accomplishing a long-sought GOP goal, in exchange for easing the path for new power lines. When Senator Manchin proposed a permitting-reform bill last year, that’s essentially what it did.
The debt-ceiling deal inherits many of the NEPA reforms first contemplated in Manchin’s bill. Today, the strictest type of NEPA review takes 4.5 years to complete, although some studies can take much longer. The deal will impose a one-year deadline for most environmental-review studies and a two-year deadline for the strictest types. If an agency overruns these deadlines, then a project’s sponsor can sue the agency to get an accelerated decision.
The deal also imposes new page limits on NEPA studies. Today, the most stringent NEPA studies run to more than 500 pages on average. The deal would cap most NEPA studies to 150 pages, and the most complicated reviews to 300 pages.
To be sure, these reforms don’t go as far as the GOP wanted. Under one Republican proposal, for instance, the penalty for overrunning a NEPA deadline would have been a project’s immediate and irrevocable approval. But the deal also declines to provide more funding for NEPA agencies to hire staff, which some progressives have argued is the most important driver of NEPA delays.
The deal also narrows some of NEPA’s most important language, reducing the number of federal actions that require the most elaborate kind of environmental-impact study. An agency will now get to determine whether a project requires the highest level of NEPA review. That is “really problematic” because it could let officials do an end-run around the NEPA process, Kym Meyer, the litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me.
Some of the deal’s most important consequences may not be visible in the legal text. The deal, for instance, says that projects qualifying for certain federal small-business loans do not need NEPA approval. That could effectively exempt many factory farms from the NEPA process, Meyer said.
The deal repeatedly inserts the words “reasonable” in NEPA, at one point limiting the types of environmental impacts that agencies must study only to those that are “reasonably foreseeable.” That may all sound, well, reasonable, and it could ultimately work out alright for environmentalists. But the courts — and the sharply conservative Supreme Court — will get to decide exactly where the lines of that reasonableness fall. “One thing we know for sure is that we’re gonna see a lot of litigation out of this,” Meyer said.
Which is not to say that Democrats failed to win concessions. Every NEPA study must now consider the environmental consequences of a project not happening — a new tool against NIMBYs who fight clean-energy projects. And energy-storage facilities, such as big batteries that store renewable electricity on the power grid, now qualify for an accelerated approval process.
The bill enacts a lot of what has been “circling around as a bipartisan set of permitting ideas for a couple of years now,” Xan Fishman, the director of energy policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a moderate think tank, told me. “It’s a lot of stuff that people on both sides of the aisle have called for, a lot of common-sense stuff. But there’s still a lot of stuff to do.”
The problem is that the bill makes all these changes without altering transmission policy at all. It funds a study on whether the United States should expand its long-distance transmission — ironic given that building new power lines already requires too many studies — but makes no substantive changes.
I’m sympathetic to the case for permitting reform, and I would describe the law’s changes to NEPA as aggressive but acceptable under the right circumstances. There’s some good stuff, some bad stuff, and much in between. But looking at the package in the context of this deal, I am more worried. By acceding to these changes, Democrats have surrendered their greatest leverage in future permitting-reform talks. Achieving transmission reform will now require much more profound changes to NEPA than many progressives may be willing to accept.
“They took care of the low-hanging fruit and there may not be a ladder high enough to get to the rest,” Rob Gramlich, a political consultant and one of the nation’s foremost transmission experts, told me.
That’s because Republicans want three major changes to federal environmental law, all of which could empower fossil fuels. First, lawmakers want to ease the way for international oil and natural-gas pipelines, limiting a president’s ability to block them under federal law. Second, Republicans want to revise the Clean Water Act so states can’t use it to block pipelines for climate-related reasons.
Finally, Republicans want to impose even stricter time limits on NEPA, adding a statute of limitations and a deadline for how long a NEPA-related lawsuit can drag on. This would require the biggest gamble of all: By time-delimiting NEPA fights, Democrats would keep NIMBYs from fighting clean-energy and mass-transit infrastructure, allowing a rapid low-carbon buildout. (As Ezra Klein has argued, NEPA hobbles the government’s power to build big public projects more than it limits private companies’.) But in doing so, Democrats would deprive environmental litigators of the time-sapping tactics that they use to slow down fossil-fuel projects.
Democrats, meanwhile, have more modest goals in any future permitting fight: They want long-distance power lines to be as easy to build as natural-gas pipelines. Right now, an interstate power line must win approval from dozens of state and local governments before it can be built, while a natural-gas pipeline only needs to be approved by a single federal agency. Democrats want to give that agency authority over transmission. Pending that, Democrats would require the grid in each region of the country to connect with its neighbors, guaranteeing a minimum amount of transmission capacity nationwide.
Suffice it to say that these are not equal goals. Republicans now want much deeper changes to NEPA than Democrats seek for transmission law. This is going to make any dealmaking much harder. It would have been a fair trade, once, to link transmission reforms to some of the permitting changes in the debt-ceiling deal. It would have been a savvy trade to package the deal’s modest reforms with some of the more aggressive proposals from each party, so as to make the ultimate “winner” of the negotiations more obscure. With those easy trades off the table, only hard choices remain.
So Democrats will soon have to make a much weightier gamble: Should they accept Republicans’ significant changes to NEPA in exchange for transmission reform?
That might feel like trading “a Taylor Swift ticket for a high-school baseball ticket,” Gramlich told me. If Democrats accept it, they will be making a world-historic bet: that decarbonization is all but assured, and that no amount of preferential treatment for pipelines or fossil fuels could change the market’s embrace of a low-carbon future. They might decide that weakening NEPA’s judicial reforms would enable a green buildout, not a gray one, allowing new IRA-subsidized infrastructure to flourish across the country. Or more darkly, they might decide that only a massive transmission mandate can secure the IRA’s carbon-reduction benefits, and that such a prize is worth a few new pipelines.
But I’ll be honest that I don’t see it happening. The party does not seem ready to make such a cosmic gamble on the future of the American energy system. Climate advocates couldn’t accept the Mountain Valley Pipeline by itself; how could they accept making it easier to build any pipeline going forward? A miracle could happen, of course, but for now, the hope of transmission reform seems dead.
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The fundamentals are the same — it’s the tone that’s changed.
At some point in the past month, the hydrogen fuel cell developer Plug Power updated its website. Beneath a carousel explaining the hydrogen ecosystem and solutions for transporting fuel, the company’s home page now contains a section titled “Hydrogen at Work.”
“Hydrogen is key to energy independence, providing clean, reliable power while reducing reliance on imported fuels,” the text in this new box reads. “Plug’s hydrogen and fuel cell solutions strengthen the energy grid and enhance national security, positioning the U.S. as a leader in the global energy transition.”
It is fairly ordinary website copy, but to a keen reader, the text jumps out as an obvious Trump 2.0 tell. Plug Power — like many green economy companies — has pivoted to meet the political and economic moment, where “energy independence” and “energy dominance” are in and “climate” and “sustainability” are out.
“I am actually shocked every time I look at the website of a climate tech company that still uses the language from 12 months ago, from four months ago — that doesn’t do them any good,” Peter Atanasoff, the managing director and vice president of Scratch Media and Marketing, which helps B2B technology companies and climate tech businesses achieve growth and recognition, told me.
The shift in language is more significant than just brands chasing the latest buzzwords.
The first Trump administration saw broad-based pushback from the business community against Trump’s more inflammatory positions, especially by consumer-facing brands that played to the pussy hat-wearing, brunch-and-protest attitudes of the time. The CEOs of Facebook (now Meta), Nike, and Google issued statements of disappointment when the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk even dropped out of the president’s business council over the decision. It was, needless to say, a very different time.
During Trump’s second term, he promised “retribution.” Many of the more moderate voices from his first administration are long gone, and there’s a palpable fear among nonprofits and businesses of drawing the wrong kind of attention from Washington, losing grant funding for saying the wrong thing. “The real trigger” for resulting differences in branding between the first and second Trump administrations has been “the change of tone and change of economic policy,” Atanasoff told me. “It is explicit opposition to any of these technologies."
The administration has launched an all-out assault not just on climate policy, but also on the very language of the energy transition. In a February memo obtained by E&E News, the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed 34 words to be erased from official documentation, including “global warming,” “carbon footprint,” “net zero,” and even “green.” As I’ve covered for Heatmap, farmers applying for Department of Agriculture grants have been encouraged to resubmit proposals with climate-focused language removed and “refocus … on expanding American energy production.” And at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists have quickly learned to pivot to talking about “air pollution” rather than emissions, contending with a banned-words list of their own.
Lobbyists and clean energy companies that want to be in the administration’s good graces have adapted, as well. That has changed the tenor of green business at large. Alexander Bryden, who runs the Washington, D.C. office of Browning Environmental Communications, told me over email that tweaking brand language is “typical after any change of administration, particularly when there are significant shifts in policy.” But especially for organizations in the public eye, “it’s more important than ever to highlight the historic and potential economic benefits of environmental solutions — and show how they are supported by, and benefit, people across the political spectrum.”
The actual fundamentals of green business haven’t changed, though. On the contrary, in the first quarter of 2025, venture capitalists and private equity firms invested more than $5 billion in climate tech startups in the U.S., a 65% increase from the same period a year earlier, according to PitchBook data. While there are certainly obstacles like supply chain uncertainty and tariffs to contend with, especially for clean energy manufacturing, on the whole “it’s still a great time to start a climate startup,” Tommy Leep, the founder of the software-focused venture firm Jetstream, told my colleague Katie Brigham last November. His caveat? “Just don’t call it a climate startup.”
Roger Ballentine, the president of the management consulting service Green Strategies and the chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Bill Clinton, explained this thinking to me. “It’s what I refer to as climate capitalism, which is the realization that by incorporating climate change and its risks and opportunities into your business strategy, you’re actually going to be a more successful, more profitable, and more competitive company,” he said. Even with the recent economic turbulence, “That hasn’t changed. That’s not going to change.”
Where you do see adjustments, however, is “around the edges,” per Ballentine. Companies are attempting to match the frequency of the administration and, in turn, the broader policy ecosystem — a frequency that tends to be aggressive, assertive, and heavy on words like “dominance” and “security.” It might also take the form of decreasing the volume at which companies had previously shouted their climate bona fides.
Anya Nelson, the senior vice president of public relations at Scratch M+M, said her team has also advised touting “American-made production” in brand messaging, and reframing copy to focus on “the positive impacts and immediate business benefits” of the companies, rather than more idealistic messaging about climate goals that may have had stronger resonance during the Biden administration.
At this point, you may have noticed that I haven’t quoted any corporate brand officers. That’s not because I didn’t try to talk to any. (Even Plug Power, my example at the beginning of this story, didn’t respond to a request for comment on the change in their messaging.) Though the sudden prevalence of terms like “energy dominance” becomes conspicuous once you start to look for them, no one wants to draw the wrong kind of attention from the administration. It’s part of a greater trend of clamming up that my colleagues and I have experienced across sectors in our reporting, and at a time when even the word “green” can give you a black mark, I can’t say I don’t understand.
Ballentine, the Green Strategies president, dismissed reading too much into how language itself changes under President Trump. “If yesterday a new technology company was touting itself as a climate solution, and now it’s touting itself as a way to achieve energy dominance — I don’t care,” he said.
His thinking was more pragmatic. “Good business remains good business,” Ballentine went on. “Around the edges, will things change? Yes. General belt tightening? Yes. Fundamental change of direction? No.”
It might sound like branding agencies are encouraging companies to “play along” with the administration, but Nelson of Scratch M+M stressed that wasn’t what she was trying to say. At the end of the day, “your end goal is to be a viable company, right?” she said. “To be a thriving company that is going to change the world, first and foremost, you need to make sure you don’t go out of business.” The message might be more accurately summarized as “read the room.”
A report from Heatmap’s San Francisco Climate Week event with Tom Steyer.
Last Thursday at San Francisco Climate Week, Heatmap hosted an event with a lineup of industry leaders and experts to discuss the most promising up-and-coming climate tech innovations amidst a backdrop of tariff and tax credit uncertainty.
Guests at Heatmap's event, Climate Tech's Next Winners.Sean Vranizan
First up, Heatmap executive editor Robinson Meyer sat down with Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor and co-founder of Galvanize Climate Solutions, to explore the most promising climate technologies to scale. “No one's going to adopt new technologies to be nice,” Steyer noted. “They're gonna adopt new technologies because they're better, because they're a better deal, because they're cheaper or in some ways solve a pain point for the customer.” Steyer went on to emphasize that there is at least one “transformational and disruptive” idea for every six verticals in the climate industry — for example, measuring carbon sequestration in nature with machine learning andAI, a concept that was “literally unimaginable 5 years ago.”
Tom Steyer and Robinson Meyer.Sean Vranizan
As for the Trump-sized elephant in the room, Steyer encouraged climate tech startups to focus on “good leadership” as well as the willingness to adapt in this uncertain moment. “You’re gonna have hard times, and the world is going to change, and you’re going to have to figure out what to do,“ he said. Steyer also noted that all Americans, not only those working in climate tech, should understand the energy transition as a background condition of their careers. “If you want to be a screenwriter (...) be a screenwriter. But it’s really important that you put [the energy transition] into your screenwriting. If you‘re a banker (...) be a banker with an awareness of this issue. Bank the good stuff, not the bad stuff,” Steyer explained. He finished up the discussion with a remembrance of the late Pope Francis, a “tremendous human being for the planet.”
Sam D'Amico and Nico Lauricella.Sean Vranizan
Also on Thursday was a lightning talk between Nico Lauricella, Heatmap’s CEO and editor in chief, and Sam D’Amico, the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, which sponsored the event. D'Amico explained that in addition to being an induction stove, Impulse’s Cooktop is “a way to get battery storage into people's homes” — a “concept car” for using batteries in appliances to create a more decentralized grid. Lauricella and D’Amico also discussed the impacts of Trump’s tariffs on clean tech companies like Impulse, with D’Amico advising other founders in the room to build prototypes based on the supply chain and to make sure they have options in terms of where their products are manufactured so they can keep up with changing trade policies.
Impulse's high-power Cooktop on display at the event.Sean Vranizan
Lastly, Heatmap News staff writer Katie Brigham hosted a panel with Gabriel Kra, managing director and co-founder at Prelude Ventures, Clea Kolster, partner and head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, and Rajesh Swaminathan, partner at Khosla Ventures. The group spoke about the unique circumstances facing investors in the climate technology space, what their firms are looking for when investing in the newest climate innovations, and how AI fits into the picture.
Katie Brigham, Clea Kolster, Gabriel Kra, and Rajesh Swaminathan.Sean Vranizan
All three panelists acknowledged that it’s a delicate time for clean tech investors and companies alike. “Volatility and uncertainty are the enemies of running and planning a business,” warned Kra. The true cost of the tariffs is therefore extremely high, Kra explained. Kolster agreed that things are generally gloomy in the investment space, but also highlighted the technologies that are currently thriving. Carbon removal, she pointed out, “is going better than ever. Contracts are being inked right now, in the past few weeks.” The companies and technologies she’s excited about, Kolster added, are building “cheaper, better, faster,” as Steyer pointed out earlier in the evening.
Swaminathan added that there will always be a certain element of risk when it comes to investing in emerging technologies. “Clean tech companies have so many single points of failure,” he said. “And you have to prop up each part with the right leadership team. You have to have strong pillars so that [your company] doesn’t break.”
Guests following the discussion.Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Guests at SFCW
Sean Vranizan
Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Impulse, as well as our supporting sponsor, V2 Communications, and our event host, IndieBio.
On DOJ lawsuits, reconciliation, and solar permitting
Current conditions: A month out from the start of hurricane season, the North Atlantic Ocean is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it was this time last year• Passenger ferry crossings between New Zealand’s North and South Island remain suspended through Friday afternoon due to a severe windstorm• Thunderstorms are expected to settle over Louisville, Kentucky, this afternoon, leading to a potentially wet Kentucky Derby on Saturday at Churchill Downs.
The Justice Department filed lawsuits this week against Hawaii, Michigan, New York, and Vermont to block the states’ climate-motivated lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. The government’s lawsuit against Hawaii and Michigan, filed on Wednesday, seeks to block the states from suing major oil and gas companies over alleged climate damages, which the DOJ argues obstructs the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the DOJ also filed suit against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws, which would require fossil fuel companies to pay for damages caused by climate change, calling it a “transparent monetary-extraction scheme.” Attorney General Pamela Bondi argued all four laws are “burdensome and ideologically motivated” and “threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security.”
The House Natural Resources Committee released its portion of Republicans’ budget package on Thursday evening. The proposal goes to markup next week, and is subject to change, but includes several significant measures across its 96 pages. Some include:
In a statement slamming the bill, Lydia Weiss, the senior director of government relations at The Wilderness Society, said the proposals in sum will “fund tax cuts for the rich while doing nothing to help the average American taxpayer.” You can read the full contents of the bill here.
The Bureau of Land Management has approved a new solar project in Yuma County, Arizona, after a temporary halt on permitting. The move “appears to be the first utility-scale solar facility on federal acreage approved by the Trump administration,” my colleague Jael Holzman writes in The Fight. The BLM additionally released a draft environmental review of a separate solar project, also in Arizona.
As Jael notes, “The fact BLM is willing to admit other solar projects could advance later on is significant after the sputtering seen in the earliest days of the Trump administration.” Her caveat, however, is that it’s unclear if this means solar permitting is a beneficiary of the president’s “energy dominance” agenda, or if “at any moment, a news cycle or disgruntled legislator could steal the president’s ear and make him angry at solar power.”
A view of Punta Gorda, Florida, in 2024 after Hurricane Milton.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The major reinsurance company Swiss Re has released a lengthy report about the upward trend of insured losses in the United States. Among its findings:
Read more of Swiss Re’s findings in the report here.
The Trump administration has ordered the National Science Foundation to stop awarding new grants or supplying funds for existing grants “until further notice,” according to an email reviewed by Nature. Before the funding freeze, NSF leadership had recently directed its staffers to return grant proposals concerning “topics or activities” not “in alignment with agency priorities” to their applicants.
In the past two weeks, the NSF has terminated $739 million worth of grants, Nature adds. As one NSF staffer told the publication, the Trump administration is “butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades.” Colin Carlson, who is researching pandemic-causing viruses at Yale University with a team of 50 funded by a $12.5 million NSF grant, said the freeze will “destroy people’s labs.” The NSF has also contributed enormously to climate science over the years, including funding the first major ice core drilling project in Greenland in 1980 to study historical carbon dioxide data, and more recently, using advanced climate modeling to predict extreme weather events better.
“Saying that the U.S. is striving for energy dominance except in the clean energy sector is like opening a steakhouse and forgetting the meat.” —Former Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, writing for Heatmap about why real energy dominance requires preserving the IRA.