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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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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.