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Tonight, for the third time, Donald Trump will accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president. But this time, for the first time ever, Trump is also on track to outright win the presidential election he is involved in. He has opened a two-point lead in polling averages, but some polls show a more decisive margin in swing states; no Democrat has been in a worse position in the polls, at this point in the election, since the beginning of the century. Even Trump’s decisions — his selection of JD Vance as his vice president, for instance — suggests that Trump is planning to win.
And so it is time to begin thinking in earnest about what a Trump presidency might mean for decarbonization and the energy transition. For the next several months, Heatmap’s journalists will cover — with rigor, fairness, and perspicacity — that question. (They already have.)
Should Trump win, there are a few predictions we can make with relative certainty. The Trump administration will roll back the Environmental Protection Agency’s car and truck pollution rules, which Republicans describe as a tyrannical EV mandate forced on unwilling American consumers. Trump will also try to unwind the EPA’s restrictions on carbon emissions from power plants. And he will once again take the United States out of the Paris Agreement, just as he did during his first term. Trump has also pledged to reclassify more than 50,000 federal employees as political appointees. That would make it possible for them to be fired en masse.
Make no mistake, Trump would be a disaster for American climate policy — and if your biggest issue is that the United States should aim to rapidly reduce its emissions of heat-trapping pollution, then you probably shouldn’t vote for him. But just because he will wreck climate change policy doesn’t guarantee that he will destroy the clean energy economy. A second Trump administration would be a bleak time for decarbonization advocates, but it would not be a hopeless time — even if we see a powerful and even Caesarist Trump administration, politics would go on. It is worth thinking about what those politics could look like ahead of time.
Trump’s first term saw no shortage of contradictions in his climate program. Trump was a climate change denier who seemed to revel in unraveling environmental programs. But he also ultimately signed the Energy Act of 2020, a bipartisan package written by Senator Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski that boosted the advanced nuclear industry, energy storage, and carbon capture, and which created programs that were later funded by Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Another key contradiction in Trump’s first term was the interplay of the executive and legislative branches. Trump’s political appointees — including Scott Pruitt, his notorious and scandal-ridden EPA chief — pursued an aggressively pro-carbon agenda, rolling back environmental protections and opening up huge new swaths of public land to oil and gas drilling. The White House kept proposing budgets that cut tens of billions of dollars from key federal programs, including the EPA and the Department of Energy.
But Congress never actually passed those budgets. It became one of the strangest two-steps of the Trump administration: Again and again, the White House would unveil a radical, lacerating budget proposal that zeroed out key programs across the federal government and sent it to Congress. The press would cover Trump’s plans to destroy federal agencies, and the public would react with alarm. Then, several months later, Congress would pass a far more conventional budget. In May 2017, for example — the peak of Trump’s post-election Republican trifecta — Congress passed a budget that preserved nearly all EPA programs and increased funding for some renewable energy programs, including ARPA-E.
This doesn’t mean that the EPA and other federal agencies survived the first Trump administration unscathed. Many federal agencies saw brain drain throughout the four years of Trump; when Biden took office in 2021, his political appointees said that their first act was to rebuild the agencies’ depleted capacity. And if Trump carried out his aspiration of firing tens of thousands of federal workers, then the agencies would be even more beset, even more dysfunctional, at the end of his next term.
But the Trump White House seemed torn between the impulse to radically restructure the administrative state and the need to finalize its own deregulatory rules. The administration’s incompetence at dotting its i’s and crossing its t’s kept getting in the way of its own agenda: While the federal government usually beats legal challenges to its own rules, the Trump administration lost roughly 80% of its court fights.
Now, unlike during his first term, Trump will have a more favorable Supreme Court to work with: Conservatives now hold a 6-3 majority on the high court — and it could easily become 7-2 under a Trump administration. Last month, the Supreme Court made it harder for the regulatory state to issue any new rules, essentially subjugating agency authority to the judiciary. That could allow the Supreme Court to force a Trump initiative into law — but it could also hamstring Trump’s agencies by forcing them to do more work, to file more paperwork, to respond to even more public comments.
A second Trump presidency will differ from its prequel in at least one respect: its fossil fuel of choice. Throughout the 2016 election, Trump bound his campaign to the coal industry, pledging to bring back mining jobs and end Obama’s “war on coal.” Soon after his election, he received a coal “action plan” directly from Bob Murray, the CEO of what was then the country’s largest coal company.
Trump failed. Murray’s company declared bankruptcy in 2019, and coal mining jobs collapsed to a historic low in November 2020. (Coal mining employment has modestly recovered under Biden.) Now, as Heatmap columnist Paul Waldman has observed, Trump barely talks about coal at all; he now seems to revere the oil and gas industry. In April, he met with oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago and asked for $1 billion in campaign donations.
This speaks to another contradiction that’s far bigger than Trump, between the varying needs of big and small fossil fuel companies. Climate advocates sometimes talk about “the fossil fuel industry” as a monolith, but in fact it is riven with its own divisions and disagreements. Oil and natural gas companies have different demands from coal companies. There are also disagreements between large oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, whose size lets them afford higher regulatory burdens, and smaller oil and gas drillers, who oppose any regulation whatsoever. This divergence could affect how the Trump administration handles the EPA’s methane rules, which require oil companies to cap and monitor greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas drilling equipment.
Then there’s nuclear power, the country’s most prolific zero-carbon fuel, which enjoys nearly unmatched bipartisan support but which some voters are much more wary of. Many nuclear advocates see Trump as neutral on the technology, even a potential ally, but Project 2025 proposes canceling the tens of billions of dollars in nuclear subsidies that the Biden administration has proposed. That would render the industry uneconomic and force many plants to close.
These are, of course, not even the most important contradictions that will define Trump’s White House. (I remain curious, for instance, about how Trump’s backers in Silicon Valley — whose personal wealth is tied up with big American tech companies and who detest Biden’s aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement — feel about Trump’s devil-may-care approach to defending Taiwan or about J.D. Vance’s praise of Lina Khan.)
Trump has promised to bring back manufacturing to the United States and wage a trade war on China. He also opposes electric vehicles. But some of the country’s biggest new manufacturing facilities are going to make EVs and batteries — and these are in the Republican heartland of South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, as well as the battleground state of Georgia. Trump has pledged to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 tax credit for buying EVs, and Project 2025 proposes neutering the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which can lend money to fund new EV factories. How will those anti-decarbonization policies fit in with local Republican economies? It is not hard to imagine a world where Trump repeals the consumer tax credit for EVs and claims victory over it, but preserves the IRA’s far more lucrative 45x subsidy that rewards companies that make batteries and EVs. That would leave some of the most important pro-EV policy in the IRA intact while generating the necessary anti-climate headlines.
These focuses of ideological slippage shouldn’t make climate advocates feel more relaxed — on the contrary, some of Trump’s most authoritarian impulses have been unleashed in response to political weakness or outright unpopularity. Perhaps that’s most clear around Trump’s outright denial of climate change, which remains among the most unpopular parts of his agenda. Is it any wonder that Jeffrey Clark, a climate-questioning environment lawyer who Trump installed at the Justice Department, ultimately helped lead the department’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election?
The great irony — you might even say tragedy — of American energy policy is that voters across the parties see energy as a culture war issue. Environmentalists dream of creating an all-renewable energy system even though it would gobble up massive amounts of land. Republicans talk about supporting nuclear power, even though the nuclear industry has always and everywhere required state support. Trump, a pile of contradictions himself, and a distracted culture warrior, will only accelerate these contradictions. I am by no means optimistic about the results. But I expect that the reality of Trump’s governance will, even on these issues, surprise us.
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It’s already conquered solar, batteries, and EVs. With a $2 billion new turbine factory in Scotland, it may have set its next target.
Batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles. The story of renewable energy deployment globally is increasingly one of China’s fiercely competitive domestic industries and deep supply chains exporting their immense capacity globally. Now, it may be wind’s turn.
The Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced last week that it plans to invest $2 billion in a factory in Scotland. The facility is scheduled to start production in late 2028, churning out offshore wind equipment for use in the United Kingdom, which has over 15 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, as well as for export, likely in Europe.
The deal comes as China finds itself at a kind of domestic clean energy crossroads, in terms of both supply and demand. On the former, the country has launched a campaign aimed at softening the cutthroat domestic competition, overproduction, and price wars that have defined many of its green industries, especially electric vehicles.
At the same time, China is setting out to alter its electricity markets to put renewable energy on a more market-based footing, while also paying coal-fired power plants to stay on the grid, as University of California, San Diego researcher Michael Davidson explained on a recent episode of Shift Key. These changes in electricity markets will reduce payments to solar and wind producers, making foreign markets potentially more attractive.
“We anticipate Chinese original equipment manufacturers will intensify their push toward international expansion, with Mingyang’s planned investment a signal of this trend,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note to clients. “This poses a challenge for Western incumbents, as Chinese players can capitalize on their cost advantages in a market driven by price.”
Ironically, Fulop said, the market changes will make the Chinese market more like Europe’s, which has become more price conscious as the market has matured and reductions in cost have slowed or outright stopped. “The transition is expected to make renewable developers increasingly price-sensitive as they seek to preserve project returns, ultimately weighing on wind turbine manufacturers’ profitability,” he wrote.
There’s a “cliff” coming in Chinese renewable energy deployment, Kyle Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, told me. “Overall, the net effect is expected to be a pretty sharp drop, and we’re already starting to see some of the effects of that.”
And turbine manufacturers would not be the first Chinese renewable industry to show up in Europe.
“There’s already an existing model” for Chinese manufacturers to set up shop in Western countries, Chan said. Chinese companies are already planning to manufacture solar modules in France, while Chinese EV maker BYD’s is planning factories in Hungary, Turkey, and potentially Spain.
China as a whole is responsible for over half of all new offshore wind capacity added in 2024, according to Global Energy Monitor, and has been growing at a 41% annual rate for the past five years. The energy intelligence firm Rystad estimates that China will make up 45% of all offshore wind capacity by 2030. Ming Yang itself claims to be behind almost a third of new offshore wind capacity built last year.
Meanwhile, offshore wind projects in the West — especially the United States — have faced the omnicrisis of high interest rates, backed-up supply chains, and Donald Trump. News of Ming Yang’s Scotland factory sent yet another shock through the ailing Western offshore wind market, with shares in the Danish company Vestas down 4% when the market opened Monday.
But with Chinese products and Chinese investment comes controversy and nerves among European political leaders. “There’re questions about tech transfer and job creation,” Chan said. “They also face some security issues and potential political backlash.”
In August, the German asset manager Luxcara announced that it would use Siemens Gamesa turbines for a planned offshore wind project instead of Ming Yang ones after backlash from German defense officials. “We see this as further evidence that a Chinese entry into the European wind market remains challenging,” analysts at Jefferies wrote to clients in August.
They were right to be skeptical — Chinese turbines’ entry into the European market has been long predicted and yet remains unrealized. “China’s increasingly cheap wind turbines could open new markets,” S&P Global Insights wrote in 2022, citing the same cost advantages as Morningstar did in reference to the Ming Yang factory announcement.
“China was already trying to angle into the European market,” Chan told me, seeing it as comparable to the U.S. in size and potentially more open to Chinese investment. “If they were kind of thinking about it before, now it’s gotten a greater sense of commercial urgency because I think the expectation is that their profit margins are really going to get squeezed.”
While China leads the world in building out renewable energy capacity domestically and exporting technology abroad, it has “decided not to decide” on pursuing a rapid, near-term decarbonization, Johns Hopkins University China scholar Jeremy Wallace recently argued in Heatmap.
While that means that the Paris Agreement goals are even farther out of reach, it may be fine for Chinese industries, including wind, as they look to sell abroad.
“Chinese firms have lots of reasons to want to build things abroad: Diversification away from the Chinese market, the zero or negative profits from selling domestically, and geopolitical balancing,” Wallace told me.
“If Brits want to have their citizens making the turbines that will power the country,” Wallace said, “this seems like a reasonable opportunity.”
Current conditions: A major Pacific storm is drenching California and bringing several inches of snow to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming • A tropical storm in the Atlantic dumped nearly a foot of water on South Carolina over three days • Algeria is roasting in temperatures of more than 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Department of Energy notified workers in multiple offices Friday that they were likely to be fired or reassigned to another part of the agency, E&E News reported Tuesday. Staffers at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of State and Community Energy Programs received notices stating that the offices would “be undergoing a major reorganization and your position may be reassigned to another organization, transferred to another function or abolished.” Still, the notice said “no determination has been made concerning your specific position” just yet.
At least five offices received “general reduction in force notices,” as opposed to official notification of a reduction in force, according to a Latitude Media report. These included the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of State and Community Energy Plans, and the Office of Fossil Energy. Nearly 200 Energy Department employees received direct layoff notices.
Catastrophic floods brought on by the remnants of a typhoon devastated the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk on Sunday. Five months ago, the Trump administration canceled a $20 million grant intended to protect the community against exactly this kind of extreme flooding, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The grant from the Environmental Protection Agency was meant to stabilize the riverbank on which Kipnuk is built. But in May, the agency yanked back the Biden-era grant, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said was “no longer consistent” with the government’s priorities. In a post on X, Zeldin said the award was part of "wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants,” suggesting the funding was part of an ideological push for diversity, equity, and inclusion rather than a practical infrastructure boost to an Indigenous community facing serious challenges.
Zealan Hoover, a Biden-era senior adviser at the EPA, accused Zeldin of using “inflammatory rhetoric” that misrepresented the efforts in places like Kipnuk. “For decades, E.P.A. has been a partner to local communities,” Hoover said. “For the first time under this administration, E.P.A. has taken an aggressively adversarial posture toward the very people and communities that it is intended to protect.”
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Late last Thursday, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman observed that the status of the 6.2-gigawatt Esmeralda 7, the nation’s largest solar project, had changed on the Bureau of Land Management’s website to “canceled.” The news sent shockwaves nationwide and drew blowback even from Republicans, including Utah Governor Spencer Cox, as I reported in this newsletter. Now, however, the bureau’s parent agency is denying that it made the call to cancel the project. “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Utility Dive. “Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
That means the project could still move forward with a piecemeal approach to permitting rather than one overarching approval, which aligns with what one of the developers involved told Jael last week. A representative for NextEra said that it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and that the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.” Still, the move represents a devastating setback for the solar installation, which may never fully materialize.
Ethane exports are rising as export capacity soars.EIA
U.S. exports of ethane, a key petrochemical feedstock extracted from raw natural gas during processing, are on track for “significant growth” through 2026, according to new analysis from the Energy Information Administration. Overseas sales are projected to grow 14% this year compared to the previous year, and another 16% next year. Ethane is mostly used as a feedstock for ethylene, a key ingredient in plastics, resins, and synthetic rubber. China has been the fastest growing source of demand for American ethane in recent years, rising to the largest single destination with 47% of exports last year.
Spain’s electricity-grid operator shrugged off concerns of another major blackout after detecting two sharp voltage variations in recent weeks. Red Electrica, which operates Spain’s grid, said that what The Wall Street Journal described as “recent voltage swings” didn’t threaten to knock out the grid because they stayed within acceptable limits. But the operator warned that variations could jeopardize the electricity supply if the grid didn’t overhaul its approach to managing a system that increasingly relies on intermittent, inverter-based generating sources such as solar panels. Red, which is 20% owned by the Spanish government, acknowledged that the high penetration of renewables was responsible for the recent fluctuations. Among the changes needed to improve the grid: real-time monitoring, which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted in April “is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered.”
It’s not just Spain facing blackouts. New York City will have a power deficiency equivalent to the energy needed to power between 410,000 and 650,000 homes next summer — and that number could double by 2050, the state’s grid operator warned this week in its latest five-year report. “The grid is at a significant inflection point,” Zach Smith, senior vice president of system and resource planning for NYISO, said in a statement to Gothamist. “Depending on future demand growth and generator retirements, the system may need several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation within the next 10 years.”
Sodium-ion batteries are all the rage, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported yesterday about the commercial breakthrough by the startup Alsym. But a major challenge facing sodium-ion batteries compared to lithium-ion rivals is the stability of the cathode material in air and water, which can degrade the battery’s performance and lifespan. A new study by researchers at Tokyo University of Science found that one ingredient can solve the problem: Calcium. By discovering the protective effects of calcium doping in the batteries, “this study could pave the way for the widespread adoption” of sodium-ion batteries.
Rob talks with the author and activist about his new book, We Survived the Night.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His first book, We Survived the Night, was released this week — it uses memoir, reporting, and literary anthology to tell the story of Native families across North America, including his own.
NoiseCat was previously an environmental and climate activist at groups including 350.org and Data for Progress. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks with Julian about Native American nations and politics, the complexity and reality of Native life in 2025, and the “trickster” as a recurring political archetype.
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. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What were lessons that you took away from the writing of the book, or from the reporting of the book, that changed how you thought about climate or the environment in some way that maybe wasn’t the case when you were working on these issues full time?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: I would say that while I was working on climate issues, I was actually, myself, really changing a lot in terms of my thoughts on how politics worked and did not work. I think I came into my period of my life as a climate activist really believing in the power of direct action, and protest, and, you know, if you get enough people in the streets and you get enough politicians on your side, you eventually can change the laws. And I think that there is some truth to that view.
But I think being in DC for four years, being really involved in this movement, conversation — however you want to put that — around the Green New Deal, around eventually a Biden administration and how that would be shaped around how they might go about actually taking on climate change for the first time in U.S. history in a significant way, really transformed my understanding of how change happens. I got a greater appreciation, for example, for the importance of persuading people to your view, particularly elites in decision-making positions. And I also started to understand a little bit more of the true gamesmanship of politics — that there is a bit of tricks and trickery, and all kinds of other things that are going on in our political system that are really fundamental to how it all works.
And I bring that last piece up because while I was writing the book, I was also thinking really purposefully about my own people’s narrative traditions, and how they get at transformations and how they happen in the world. And it just so happens that probably the most significant oral historical tradition of my own people is a story called a coyote story, which is about a trickster figure who makes change in the world through cunning and subterfuge and tricks, and also who gets tricked himself a fair amount.
And I think that in that worldview, I actually found a lot of resonance with my own observations on how political change happened when I was in Washington, D.C., and so that insight did really deeply shape the book.
Mentioned:
We Survived the Night, by Julian Brave NoiseCat
How Deb Haaland Became the First Native American Cabinet Secretary
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.