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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 climatepolicy — 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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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images