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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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On global emissions, Bill Gates on Chinese nuclear, and a geothermal breakthrough
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa made landfall over Jamaica as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record before barreling north toward Cuba • A cold front will send temperatures plunging as far as 15 degrees below average across the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast • The Colombian Andes are bracing for flooding amid up to 8 inches of rain forecast for Wednesday.

The Trump administration’s all-of-government approach to thwarting construction of offshore wind turbines has included the Department of the Interior de-designating federal waters to turbine development and the Department of Transportation yanking funding, in addition to various steps taken by other agencies. Now the Department of Health and Human Services is taking its swing at the industry. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to open an investigation into the potential harms offshore wind farms pose. In late summer, the agency instructed the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to prepare research about wind farms’ impact on fishing businesses. The effort included Kennedy personally meeting with NIOSH director Josh Howard, in the course of which he gave Howard — a career physician and lawyer who previously oversaw federal efforts on September 11 victims’ health — specific experts to contact, according to the newswire report. The U.S. Surgeon General’s office has also been involved in the initiative.
It’s part of what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind,” an assault that started on President Donald Trump’s first day back in office. Earlier this month, oil major Shell’s top executive in the United States warned that the precedents the administration was setting risked being weaponized against fossil fuel companies once Trump exited power.
In the first real decline ever forecast by the United Nations, global emissions are now expected to fall by 10% below 1990 levels by 2035, according to a report issued Tuesday. But the world remains far off from the 60% reduction goal scientists say is necessary to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the target leaders committed to when they signed the Paris Agreement a decade ago. “Humanity is now clearly bending the emissions curve downwards for the first time, although still not nearly fast enough,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told Bloomberg on Tuesday. “We have a serious need for more speed.”
The latest assessment comes as the U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris climate negotiations and other countries are paring back spending on decarbonization ahead of the UN climate talks in Belem, Brazil, next month.
On Tuesday, Bill Gates released a provocative new treatise on climate change in which he laid out what he sees as necessary ahead of November’s climate summit. Before that, on Friday afternoon, the billionaire philanthropist gathered with half a dozen journalists in a conference room in Manhattan to discuss his latest ideas over lunch. Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer, who was in attendance, has a good breakdown of some of what Gates discussed. I also attended the lunch and wanted to highlight another point Gates made: The West is losing the race for new nuclear power. When it comes to fission, China is building more reactors than anyone else, and helped perfect the Westinghouse AP1000 before its successful construction in the U.S. Gates’ own reactor developer, TerraPower, had plans to build its debut plant in China prior to the souring in relations between Washington and Beijing nearly a decade ago. When it comes to fusion, he said, there’s no topping how much funding China has directed toward the technology.
“The amount of money they’re putting into fusion is more than the rest of the world put together, times two,” Gates told us. “There is a substantial amount of Chinese capital going into that, and in fission, they built the most reactors.”
Chemical giant Honeywell has announced a new technology that converts agricultural and forestry waste into ready-to-use renewable fuels that can directly replace the carbon-intensive fuel used by large ships and airplanes. The so-called “Biocrude Upgrading” processing hardware can be provided in modular form and equipped to ships at a moment when global regulators are seeking to slash the roughly 3% of planet-heating emissions that come from cargo vessels. “The maritime industry has a real need for renewable fuels that are immediately available and cost effective,” Ken West, Honeywell’s energy and sustainability solutions president, said in a statement. The news comes nearly two weeks after Trump “torpedoed” — as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it — efforts at the International Maritime Organization to slash emissions from regulated ships.
The geothermal startup Eavor said Tuesday that its breakthroughs in drilling had slashed the time it takes to drill its wells underground. The Canadian company said that the results of two years of drilling at its flagship project in Geretsried, Germany, showed its efforts to dig to hotter and deeper locations are working. “Much like wind and solar have come down the cost curve, much like unconventional shale [oil and gas] have come down the cost curve, we now have a technical proof-point that we’ve done that in Europe,” Jeanine Vany, a cofounder and executive vice president of corporate affairs at Eavor, told Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci.
The breakup of the ancient supercontinent 1.5 billion years ago transformed the Earth’s surface environments and laid the groundwork for the emergence of complex life. That’s according to new research by Australian scientists at the University of Sydney and the University of Adelaide. The findings challenge what has long been called the “boring billion,” a time when biological and geological changes effectively stalled. The plate tectonics that reshaped the planet triggered conditions that supported oxygen-rich oceans and fostered the appearance of the first eukaryotes, the ancestors of all complex life. “Our work reveals that deep Earth processes, specifically the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Nuna, set off a chain of events that reduced volcanic carbon dioxide emissions and expanded the shallow marine habitats where early eukaryotes evolved,” Dietmar Müller, a University of Sydney professor and the study’s lead author, said in a press release.
Rob talks New Jersey past, present, and future with Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath.
Electricity prices are the biggest economic issue in the New Jersey governor’s race, which is perhaps next month’s most closely watched election. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate and frontrunner, has pledged to freeze power prices for state residents after getting elected. Can she do that?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a center-left think tank that aims to encourage a “full-employment, robust-growth economy.” He’s also a nearly lifelong NJ resident. They chat about how New Jersey got such expensive electricity, whether the nuclear construction boom is real, and what lessons nuclear companies should take from economic history.
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.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Is there a nuclear bubble? … As people who are interested in long-term decarbonization, number one, this is quite reminiscent of the environment that hit clean energy companies right as Biden was taking office. And number two, is there a nuclear bubble, and what does this mean for how we should think about nuclear going forward? Because at the end of this, I think the only way that any of this helps the climate is if we build a lot more plants.
Skanda Amarnath: We are definitely in a moment when there’s a lot of froth. I don’t want to say everything — it’s always like, it’ll feel unfair and not accurate to go after every single proposition that’s in markets. Like for example, Rick Perry’s Fermi America, they did an IPO and raised a lot of capital pretty successfully. And they have a plan for how they want to build a lot of stuff out — gas, solar, batteries. They want to build four AP1000s, the large, light-water reactors that are seen as the most recent that we’ve built in the United States, and they think they could do them at the same speed that China builds those same reactors.
On the surface of it, there are parts of it that seem interesting and promising. On the other hand, there’s also parts of it that feel very much wrapped up in the speculative frenzy. It gets more exaggerated when you get to like examples like Oklo. They seem to be very politically connected, specifically to Chris Wright. That plus some very small milestone successes in the fuel supply chain are now being sort of magnified into, They’re going be very successful in building out there first of a kind technology. And even in the space of small modular reactors, what they’re offering seems at least substantially more risky than what may be — outside of the space, so even compared to GE’s proposition for a small boiling water reactor, the technology that’s involved with like Oklo is kind of out there.
And one of the things, the lessons of nuclear, if you look through the history, is the more new stuff you’re doing, the harder it is, the more likely it is that you will get heartburn in terms of cost, in terms of schedule, and you never want to do this again. And it’ll involve a lot of bankruptcy, as it did with the case of the Georgia reactors that were built in the last decade. And so this is a sign that there’s clearly a lot of hype and a lot of willingness to take risk, and it’s not really backed up by fundamentals. That can be sometimes overrated in a boom. But that is something that people will look to in a bust and say, what were we doing here? Why was the price of the stock so high?
Mentioned:
How Electricity Got So Expensive
New Jersey’s Next Governor Probably Can’t Do Much About Electricity Prices, by Matt Zeitlin for Heatmap
Previously on Shift Key: The Last Computing-Driven Electricity Demand Boom That Wasn’t
Meta lays off 600 workers
Amazon lays off 14,000 workers
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
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.
The storm currently battering Jamaica is the third Category 5 to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year, matching the previous record.
As Hurricane Melissa cuts its slow, deadly path across Jamaica on its way to Cuba, meteorologists have been left to marvel and puzzle over its “rapid intensification” — from around 70 miles per hour winds on Sunday to 185 on Tuesday, from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in just a few days, from Category 2 occurring in less than 24 hours.
The storm is “one of the most powerful hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic basin,” the National Weather Service said Tuesday afternoon. Though the NWS expected “continued weakening” as the storm crossed Jamaica, “Melissa is expected to reach southeastern Cuba as an extremely dangerous major hurricane, and it will still be a strong hurricane when it moves across the southeastern Bahamas.”
So how did the storm get so strong, so fast? One reason may be the exceptionally warm Caribbean and Atlantic.
“The part of the Atlantic where Hurricane Melissa is churning is like a boiler that has been left on for too long. The ocean waters are around 30 degrees Celsius, 2 to 3 degrees above normal, and the warmth runs deep,” University of Redding research scientist Akshay Deoras said in a public statement. (Those exceedingly warm temperatures are “up to 700 times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” the climate communication group Climate Central said in a press release.)
Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded in 2024 that “tropical cyclone intensities globally are projected to increase” due to anthropogenic climate change, and that “rapid intensification is also projected to increase.”
NOAA also noted that research suggested “an observed increase in the probability of rapid intensification” for tropical cyclones from 1982 to 2017 The review was still circumspect, however, labeling “increased intensities” and “rapid intensification” as “examples of possible emerging human influences.”
What is well known is that hurricanes require warm water to form — at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. “As long as the base of this weather system remains over warm water and its top is not sheared apart by high-altitude winds, it will strengthen and grow.”
A 2023 paper by hurricane researcher Andra Garner argued that between 1971 and 2020, rates of intensification of Atlantic tropical storms “have already changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet and oceans,” and specifically that the number of these storms that intensify from Category 1 or weaker “into a major hurricane” — as Melissa did so quickly — “has more than doubled in the modern era relative to the historical era.”
“Hurricane Melissa has been astonishing to watch — even as someone who studies how these storms are impacted by a warming climate, and as someone who knows that this kind of dangerous storm is likely to become more common as we warm the planet,” Garner told me by email. She likened the warm ocean waters to “an extra shot of caffeine in your morning coffee — it’s not only enough to get the storm going, it’s an extra boost that can really super-charge the storm.”
This year has been an outlier for the Atlantic with three Category 5 storms, University of Miami senior research associate Brian McNoldy wrote on his blog. “For only the second time in recorded history, an Atlantic season has produced three Category 5 hurricanes,” with wind speeds reaching and exceeding 157 miles per hour, he wrote. “The previous year was 2005. This puts 2025 in an elite class of hurricane seasons. It also means that nearly 7% of all known Category 5 hurricanes have occurred just in this year.” One of those Category 5 storms in 2005 was Hurricane Katrina.
Jamaican emergency response officials said that thousands of people were already in shelters amidst storm surge, flooding, power outages, and landslides. Even as the center of the storm passed over Jamaica Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service warned that “damaging winds, catastrophic flash flooding and life-threatening storm surge continues in Jamaica.”