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Don’t ignore what the president says he wants to do, no matter how unwise it seems.
On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump signed orders placing 25% tariffs on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico, and a lower, 10% tariff on Canadian oil, natural gas, uranium, and other energy sources.
Trump also imposed a 10% tariff on all goods imported from China.
The tariffs will go into effect on Tuesday, giving Trump — who revels in proposing tariffs but has shown some reluctance to impose them for real — another 48 hours to maneuver. But if the new tariffs do actually bite, then they will affect nearly half of America’s imports and reshape some of the world’s most important energy and trading relationships.
Every day, millions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of natural gas flow across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico borders. The three countries have developed an integrated and harmonized network of pipelines, storage tanks, and refineries that has helped turn the United States into the world’s No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas.
The tariffs will almost inevitably disrupt that relationship. They may also upset the millions of dollars’ worth of electricity that shuttles from Canada to the United States every day across their shared power grids.
The tariffs will prove economically painful, although just how damaging is hard to know in advance. They could shrink the United States’ GDP by 0.4%, while increasing taxes by $830 per household, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, a center-right think tank. Another estimate from the Budget Lab at Yale says that the tariffs could push up the personal consumption expenditures price index — the Fed’s chosen inflation gauge — by 0.75%, reducing the average household’s purchasing power by $1,200 over the course of a year.
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These costs could worsen as Mexico, Canada, and China raise their own tariffs or trade barriers in retaliation. Late on Saturday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada would impose its own 25% tariffs on CA$155 billion of goods imported from the United States.
The economic hit to the U.S. economy could also be much larger than estimated if some manufacturers respond to higher costs not by hiking prices, but rather by delaying or shutting down production.
We’ve been reporting on the economic impact of these tariffs at Heatmap over the past week, documenting their potential impacts for oil refineries and the electricity grid. But now that the details are here, a few things stand out.
First, the tariffs on China are qualitatively different from the tariffs on our North American neighbors — especially Canada.
Chinese tariffs are not new. Trump engaged China in a trade war during his first term and ultimately reached a handshake agreement, although he has since said that China did not buy enough American agricultural products to keep up its end of the bargain. Some of the tariffs Trump placed on Chinese imports last time — including eye-watering levies on solar panels — remain in effect; the new 10% tariff will be added to those figures.
What did not happen last time was a serious, out-and-out trade war with Canada and Mexico, America’s neighbors and biggest trading partners. Although Trump entertained the possibility of Mexican tariffs during the campaign, he did not propose tariffs on Canadian imports until after his November election.
Second, the tariffs are quantitatively different, too. The president has not yet explained why he has placed higher tariffs on Canada and Mexico, who are our allies, than on China, which is our economic frenemy at best and our geostrategic adversary at worst. During the campaign, Trump sometimes proposed a “universal tariff” of 10% to 20% on all American imported goods, regardless of their country of origin. That proposed universal tariff — which was seen by some analysts as an extreme and unlikely proposal — was at a lower rate than what he is now levying on North American imports.
Third, this trade war has apparently been concocted and planned much more haphazardly than the one during Trump’s first term. Last time, the U.S. was careful to exempt electronics — iPhones, laptops, Xboxes — from its levies, as well as other consumer products. These tariffs do not do so, at least not yet. Nor do they exempt certain minerals that are essential to manufacturing electric vehicle batteries or other high-end electronics. (Bloomberg has reported that as recently as Friday, Tesla was lobbying for an exemption for graphite, a mineral crucial to making EV anodes.)
Finally, what is so striking about these tariffs is how they will be good for almost nobody.
The tariffs will hurt the American oil industry. As I wrote earlier this week, U.S. energy companies have spent tens of billions of dollars on special equipment that can refine the sludgy, sulfurous crude oil extracted in Canada; Canadian companies, in turn, have sold us that crude oil at a discount and built infrastructure so that it can be used by the United States.
The tariffs will hurt oil refineries. The U.S. refines about 18 million barrels of oil a day, but it extracts — even today, around its all-time high — only 13.5 million barrels a day. Most of the difference between what it refines and what it extracts is made up by heavy crude from Canada and Mexico, which blends well with the lighter petroleum produced by U.S. fracking wells. By raising the cost of Canadian and Mexican fuel imports, the cost of all refined products will rise.
The tariffs will hurt anyone who buys gasoline in the Midwest and Mountain West, where Canadian oil plays a much larger role in local markets. They will hurt diesel and jet fuel prices in those regions too.
But the damage will not be limited to the fossil fuel industry.
The tariffs will hurt anyone who uses electricity across the parts of the country, especially the Northeast, that import large amounts of electricity from Canada’s roaring hydroelectric plants.
The tariffs will hurt home builders and construction companies because the United States gets its best building-grade lumber from Canada. That lumber — already made more expensive by a climate change-intensified supply crisis — will now face additional taxes at the border.
The tariffs will hurt anyone who wants to buy or rent a home in the United States because the lack of lumber will worsen the housing shortage and general affordability crisis.
They will hurt automakers, who in the past three decades have constructed sophisticated supply chains spanning North America — a logistical dance that allows a single vehicle’s components and parts to cross the U.S., Canadian, and Mexico borders many times on their way to becoming a final product. They will hurt autoworkers, who depend on that supply chain. They will even hurt car dealerships, who will respond to higher prices by selling less inventory.
If the dollar rises to accommodate the new tariff level, as some White House officials have argued, then the tariffs will hurt all U.S. domestic manufacturers because their products will become more expensive, and therefore less competitive on the global market.
I am not saying, to be clear, that these tariffs are an economic catastrophe. We don’t actually know their economic cost yet — perhaps it will be minimal. But even then, they will still be a stupid waste of money that will help nobody, and which will make the U.S. economy neither more complex nor more secure.
The tariffs are a warning. As recently as last week, Goldman Sachs analysts put the risk of tariffs at only a 20% chance of actually happening. They ignored what Trump had saidhe would do because it struck them as too implausible, too unwise, too patently harmful. Perhaps in the next two days they will be proven right. But Trump has begun to blather about many unwise and harmful ideas — invading Panama (where Secretary of State Marco Rubio is headed right now), annexing Greenland, making Canada (somehow) the 51st state. Many seem even more implausible than these tariffs, and yet Donald Trump says that he wants to do them, too. How much longer can Republican lawmakers and business leaders pretend that he doesn’t mean what he says? The chance of calamity has only just begun.
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Chaos, uncertainty, “we don’t know yet.” These are words I’ve heard more during Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House than I’ve heard at any other time as a reporter.
That’s not to say there haven’t already been real-world impacts. Trump has gutted the staff of key agencies dealing with climate policy and science, and shut multiple offices focused on environmental justice. His administration has taken offline thousands of web resources related to climate change and shut down a $5 billion offshore wind project that had just started construction. And then there’s the fact that now everyone, no matter what side of the energy transition they fall on, is talking about “energy dominance.”
With on-again-off-again tariffs, court-challenged funding freezes, “because I said so” regulatory rollbacks, and hazy threats to clean energy tax credits, it’s still hard to know what of Trump’s early actions back in office will stick. The long-term effects of Trump’s initial actions on the climate economy are still just estimates; projections. But I wanted to see what we could say definitively about Trump’s second first 100 days. What does the data tell us?
By the end of Trump’s first first 100 days, he had signed 24 executive orders, total. As of today, Trump has signed 20 executive orders related to environmental policy alone, out of more than 100 total.
This is partially a volume play. Trump stated in the run-up to the inauguration that he would sign 100 executive orders on his first day. He didn’t, but clearly quantity is part of the point.
Some executive orders are more potent than others. Legal experts say his order directing the attorney general to “stop the enforcement” of state climate programs is unlikely to go anywhere. It’s also not clear that his “reinvigoration of the clean coal industry” is more than wishful thinking. But he’s also terminated environmental justice programs and positions throughout the government, and ordered agencies to expand timber production and fishing, as well as to expedite fossil fuel development and deep-sea mining.
Trump’s tariff strategy is still shifting by the day, making it hard to pin down exactly how it will affect the clean energy transition. If global tariffs on steel and aluminum remain in place, everything — fossil fuels and renewables, internal combustion cars and EVs — will feel the pain. Tariffs on China and other East Asian countries will be tough for battery and solar companies, but they could also hurt liquified natural gas companies hoping to sell into those markets.
What we do know is that markets have been hanging on Trump’s every word, and that every utterance of “tariff” has sparked a crash. Even after Trump pulled back his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs, the economy still appears to be bracing for a recession.
Fears of a global recession have also tanked oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude oil, a common benchmark for oil prices, has traded below $65 since April 4, shortly after Trump’s global tariff announcement. Oil companies have said that $65 a barrel is the minimum price they need to profitably drill new wells.
But the trade war isn’t the only headache for U.S. producers. The same day Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, the international oil cartel OPEC+ declared that it would boost production, and will flood the market with more than 400,000 barrels per day in May. Ironically, despite his “drill, baby, drill” agenda, Trump may view both cases as a victory. He has been pushing OPEC and domestic producers alike to bring down the price of oil.
The weekly rig count, a common metric for the health of the oil industry, declined after the tariff announcement, dropping from 489 to 480 from April 4 to 11. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s the largest drop recorded since June 2023, according to Baker Hughes. (And a reminder that the U.S. produced more oil under President Biden than ever before.) Producers don’t appear to be making rash changes on the oil patch just yet, but if prices remain low, experts expect production to plateau, or even decline.
Perhaps the most difficult question to suss out in the data is the extent to which Trump’s initial actions have caused clean energy projects to collapse.
A recent report from Clean Investment Monitor, a project of the Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, found that the first quarter of this year saw the biggest loss of investment in clean manufacturing from project cancellations and closures of the past several years. The data is stark and implies that Trump is to blame, but a closer look at the projects complicates that narrative.
For example, American battery manufacturer KORE Power announced in February that it was cancelling plans to build a $1.25 billion factory in Buckeye, Arizona, but the company had quietly put its production site on the market in mid-January and is now trying to revive the plan as a factory retrofit rather than a new build. Freyr Battery cancelled a $2.6 billion plan to manufacture battery cells in Newnan, Georgia, but the company cited “rising interest rates, falling battery prices, a change in company leadership and a shift in its goals,” according to the Associated Press — Freyr has decided to produce solar panels instead. The closure of two of Solar4America’s manufacturing sites in California and South Carolina, first reported by PV Magazine, were likely due to waning sales in 2024.
Every example I found seemed to present a similarly muddled picture. It’s possible, and even likely, that Trump has spooked clean manufacturing companies and affected demand projections for things like batteries. But companies don’t seem to be citing federal policy explicitly in their decisions — at least not yet.
Investment in new projects also appears to be continuing alongside these cancellations. The Clean Investment Monitor report found that $9.4 billion worth of projects were announced in the first quarter of this year. That's more than the end of last year, but 23% below the first quarter of 2024.
Clean energy generation is another story, presenting cases where there’s no question Trump has played a role in killing projects. On his first day in office, Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum pulling approvals for the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, a project that would have created more than 700 jobs during construction, 20 permanent jobs, and brought millions in tax revenue into the state, but that faced intense local opposition. The developer behind Lava Ridge, LS Power, quietly took the project off its portfolio map.
But here, too, there’s shades of gray. Many solar farms were set to receive loans from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for example, but are in limbo as the fate of the program gets battled out in the courts. Some may not survive the time it takes for that process to play out, but if the program is ultimately salvaged, other projects could take their place.
The real moment of truth for clean manufacturing and energy generation projects is coming up in Congress, which is working on a “big, beautiful” budget bill to enact Trump’s tax cut agenda. If Republicans decide to kill the tax credits that are crucial to these factories and power plants, there’ll be no question about what happens next — or what’s to blame.
The AI-powered startup aims to provide home-level monitoring and data to utilities.
In theory at least, an electrified household could play a key role in helping stabilize the grid of the future, alleviating times of peak electricity demand by providing power back to the grid and giving utilities timely warnings about hardware that may be failing. But devices used to measure and monitor power demand today, such as smart meters, aren’t advanced enough to do this type of orchestrated power management and fault detection at a granular level — thus leaving both financial and grid efficiency savings on the table.
Enter Utilidata, which just raised a $60 million Series C funding round to get its artificial intelligence-powered software module into smart meters and other pieces of grid infrastructure. This module acts as the brains of a device, and can provide utilities with localized insights into things like electricity usage levels, the operations of distributed energy resources such as home solar and batteries, anomalies in voltage data, and hardware faults. By forecasting surges or lulls in electricity demand, Utilidata can optimize power flow, and by predicting when and where faults are likely to occur, it empowers utilities to strategically upgrade their grid infrastructure, or at least come up with contingency plans before things fail.
The company’s AI system enables all of this analysis to happen at the grid edge — the point at which the electricity system enters a customer’s home — as opposed to in a centralized cloud, which reduces bandwidth needs and allows for immediate responses.
“There's enough capability at that node to optimize multiple complex decisions and create a better holistic outcome for the customer on the grid,” Utilidata CEO Josh Brumberger told me. The company did a trial recently with the Electricity Power Research Institute that showed promising cost savings and reduced grid strain. “We were able to reduce the customer’s bill by 12.5% and shave peak [usage] by 25%,” he told me.
Utilidata’s series C was led by the clean energy investor Renown Capital Partners, with support from strategic investors such as the electricity infrastructure company Quanta and Nvidia, which Utilidata partnered with to create its AI platform.
It will still be a while before Utilidata-powered smart meters allow for automated load management down to the household level, Brumberger told me, calling this the “Holy Grail” of grid operations. That’s because making load adjustments across interconnected systems is a complex task that needs to be perfectly coordinated, often with strict regulatory oversight and opt-in from participating customers. Utilities are famously cautious about adopting new technologies such as this one, as a mishap leading to a blackout can have catastrophic consequences.
A nearer term use case, Brumberger explained, would be detecting local power glitches more quickly, or forecasting when these failures might occur. For example, a new electric vehicle in the neighborhood could potentially overload local electrical distribution equipment. Utilidata could allow the utility to replace the equipment before anything goes wrong, thus enhancing grid resiliency. Insights such as this, Brumberger said, are “going to have value immediately.”
Already Utilidata has partnered with Aclara, a large manufacturer of smart meters, to install its AI module. One day, Brumberger told me, he wants to see the tech in other grid infrastructure such as transformers, EV chargers, or automatic circuit breakers known as reclosers.
Naturally, Brumberger is also excited about the potential of integrating Utilidata’s technology into data centers, telling me he sees opportunities to deploy the company’s AI modules “at the server level, at the rack level, and at the row level, all the way up to that interconnection point,” in order to help data centers run more efficiently. As the AI boom drives data center electricity demand through the roof, Utilidata is a classic example of AI helping to ameliorate the very problem it’s created.
“Every watt of energy that does not go towards compute because it's either lost or is going towards cooling is a wasted watt,” Brumberger told me. “And so the more granular and distributed your visibility and controls are, the more efficient and valuable a system you'll have.”
On fired climate scientists, the California waiver, and Tesla’s Semi
Current conditions: Severe weather warnings continue through this evening in parts of Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota, with strong tornadoes remaining a possible threat • It will be 85 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, D.C. today, about 14 degrees above average • Late afternoon thunderstorms are expected in Ottawa, where Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre is out of a job after Monday’s snap election, which also saw Liberal Mark Carney elected to a full term as Canada’s prime minister.
On Monday, the Trump administration dismissed all of the nearly 400 contributors to the National Climate Assessment, the congressionally mandated review of how global warming impacts the United States. According to the termination email, the Sixth Climate Assessment, due out in 2028, is “being reevaluated” by the administration, although one former contributor pointed out to The New York Times that “if you get rid of all the people involved, nothing’s moving forward.”
The move follows a series of targeted attacks by the Trump administration on the country’s ability to monitor the impacts of climate change, including the termination of contracts with global research partners and the reduction of funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which the conservative policy blueprint Project 2025 has described as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate and Security, slammed the decision on Bluesky, writing, “Pretending climate risks don’t exist doesn’t make them go away, unfortunately. This move puts Americans, our communities, and our security at risk.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, the Fifth Climate Assessment, published in 2023, contained a grim accounting of the stakes: that “every region in the world is projected to face further increases in climate hazards” without “urgent, effective, and equitable” progress away from our current rate of greenhouse gas emissions.”
On Monday, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation sent a letter to every member of the House of Representatives, urging them to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s waiver for California to set vehicle emissions standards stricter than the federal government’s when the matter goes to a vote this week. The Washington D.C.-based trade association, which represents Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, and others, argued that companies were being “forced to substantially reduce the number of overall vehicles for sale to inflate their proportion of electric vehicles sales.”
Many are skeptical that Congress actually has the authority to revoke the waiver under the Congressional Review Act; the Government Accountability Office and Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough have both stated that the waiver does not fall into the category of “rules” that the CRA can block. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation remains hopeful, however, going on to refer erroneously to the waiver as a “gas vehicle ban” and adding that it will “reduce vehicle choices for consumers across the country at precisely the same time they are adjusting to the marketplace shock of 25% tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts.”
Tesla
Tesla announced Monday that it plans to produce its Semi electric trucks at its Nevada gigafactory campus by the end of the year. “We’ll be ramping the factory throughout 2026,” Dan Priestley, the head of Tesla’s Semi program, said in a video posted to Twitter, adding that the factory can produce as many as 50,000 units per year. Tesla first scheduled production to begin in 2019, with CEO Elon Musk subsequently promising in 2022 that 50,000 Semis would be in production by 2024.
If Congress votes to repeal California’s ability to set stricter car and truck pollution standards, however, it could take a big bite out of the anticipated demand for the Semis. Separately, Massachusetts earlier this month postponed enforcement of its rule requiring manufacturers of medium- and heavy-duty trucks to sell an increasing number of zero-emission vehicles beginning in 2025.
Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency received an email Monday offering them another opportunity to take a voluntary retirement or a deferred resignation, USA Today reports. The agency has already reduced its staff by at least 1,000 workers as part of the administration’s efforts to downsize the federal workforce; current employees have until May 5 to accept one of the two new options. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has previously said he intends to cut the agency’s spending by 65%. At the same time, Russ Vought, the influential head of the Office of Management and Budget, has taken a particularly aggressive attitude toward the EPA, stating in a 2023 speech, “We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
When the long overdue Cascadia earthquake eventually strikes the northwest coast of the United States, the entire coastline could drop by nearly 7 feet — which suggests not only that more than twice the number of people and structures are at risk than originally thought, but also that said risk will continue to worsen over the next 75 years due climate change-driven sea-level rise. That’s according to new research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which also found that following such an earthquake, flooding events along the coast could dramatically worsen. “The land persists down” after an event of such a magnitude, and it can last for decades or centuries, meaning “any areas that are kind of on the cusp of the floodplain are now it,” lead author Tina Dura told NBC News.
As I’ve previously reported for Heatmap, there is additional increased danger in the event of the Cascadia earthquake — known colloquially as “the Big One” — due to the recent cuts at NOAA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In the immediate aftermath of the expected earthquake, the Washington and Oregon coasts will be hit by a massive tsunami, the damage of which will also increase as sea levels rise. Seismologists estimate a 15% chance that a magnitude 8.0 or greater earthquake will strike the region within the next 50 years.
New England recorded its lowest ever electricity demand on its six-state regional grid on Sunday, thanks in part to the region’s many “behind-the-meter” rooftop solar resources.