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When Joe Biden was still running for reelection to the presidency, he often repeated the line that voters should keep him in the White House to “finish the job.” Though she would be loath to describe her mission that way, that is more or less what Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, has proposed since she took on the nomination — or perhaps more precisely, that she will keep doing the job, though the job may never be finished.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, wants to quit the job, burn down the workplace, and steamroll the rubble. At least, that’s how it can appear on some issues, climate change perhaps more than any other. There are few policy areas where this election presents such a stark difference in which path the candidates propose to take.
Let’s begin by considering Harris — a fairly ordinary Democrat when it comes to climate, in that she has committed herself to strong climate action but has not put it at the top of her policy agenda. Her truncated presidential campaign reflected that emphasis, which might have given climate activists some reason to be disappointed if what they were looking for was someone who would place their issue at the center of her campaign. Unlike abortion and economics, climate was absent from Harris’ TV ads and usually mentioned only in passing on the stump.
But by now, most advocates are savvy enough to understand that campaigning and governing are not the same thing. The commitments a president makes during the campaign matter, but structural factors matter more as the policymaking process unfolds. Where is the center of gravity in their party on the issue, and what demands will the party’s coalition make? Who are the personnel staffing key agencies, and what are their priorities? How do existing laws and programs position the administration if there is no new legislation? What other forces are trying to move climate policy in either direction?
Taking all those factors into consideration, the most likely outcome of a Harris presidency is that her administration would maintain the trajectory Joe Biden established (even if there is plenty of room for her to expand on Biden’s climate accomplishments). Subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will keep flowing. More loans will bolster innovative green tech. Many of the Biden administration appointees who currently work on energy and climate will probably stay in their jobs, or at the very least be replaced by officials with a similar outlook.
In other words, while Biden has been the most aggressive president in history on climate change, Harris would come in a close second if she does little more than continue Biden’s policies. And she hasn’t promised much more than that — during the campaign, Harris proposed no new large-scale climate initiatives.
If nothing else, that was realistic, since the prospects for a sweeping new climate bill on the scale of the IRA getting through Congress would be slight. That’s especially true if one or both houses are controlled by Republicans, a distinct possibility no matter who becomes president.
If that president is Donald Trump, on the other hand, and Republicans control Congress, the IRA and other laws that fund climate programs would be under threat. Even if the GOP does have full control, however, it doesn’t mean the entire IRA is headed for repeal. Much of the money from recent climate legislation has gone to districts represented by Republicans, who will resist a wholesale dismantling of the law, and even oil companies support some provisions from a simple desire to minimize regulatory uncertainty.
Nevertheless, a Congress determined to roll back Biden-era climate legislation will have plenty of targets to aim at, and it’s a near certainty that at least some of the provisions in the bills Biden signed would be undone. Trump would almost certainly withdraw again from the Paris climate agreement (Biden recommitted to it after Trump rejected it in his first term), move to increase fossil fuel production on federal land, stymie enforcement of environmental laws, and be a loud and consistent voice for rejecting climate science and increasing emissions.
On the campaign trail, Trump continues to promise that he will “terminate the Green New Scam” and claims that global warming is a myth “because we’re actually cooling.” Increasing domestic fossil fuel production is so important to him that he proclaimed it reason enough, along with border security, for him to become “a dictator” for a day upon taking office. On that first day, he has said, “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
But it’s more than the quantity of drilling, especially since America is already producing more oil and gas than any country ever has. Earlier this year, Trump told oil executives they should raise $1 billion for him, which, given the tax and regulatory benefits he plans to bestow on them, would be a bargain. While fossil fuel industry contributions haven’t reached that billion-dollar line, the industry’s help for Trump has been substantial.
In a Trump administration, most of the action would be in federal agencies. As Bloombergrecently reported, climate deniers with ties to Trump are “laying the groundwork to bring back coal-fired power plants, gut science at the Environmental Protection Agency and neuter the modeling used in the federal government’s national climate assessment and other reports” should he win. Though Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, it provides the most detailed elaboration of current Republican thinking on climate policy; among other things, it suggests rolling back green subsidies, shuttering the Department of Energy office distributing loans for clean technology, scaling back regulations meant to limit emissions, and weakening enforcement of environmental laws.
The most critical goal of the project, which Trump embraces wholeheartedly, is to turn thousands of civil servants into political appointees so they can be fired at will and replaced with more loyal cronies. Those who work on climate-related issues, whether scientists or administrators or weather forecasters, would probably be high on the list.
And we can’t ignore a factor that will help shape climate policy no matter who wins: the Supreme Court. When it has been discussed during this campaign, the subject has usually been the 2022 Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the court’s recent decisions on the legal architecture of government regulation could have an effect just as momentous for climate policy as Dobbs has had on abortion.
In the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, the court ended “Chevron deference,” essentially seizing for itself the responsibility to guide implementation of laws that had previously rested with federal agencies. The effect on future climate policy will likely be enormous. We are at the front end of a wave of lawsuits by fossil fuel companies and polluters of all kinds looking to the court’s conservative majority to neuter environmental regulations. There’s no telling just how far the conservative majority will go, but there isn’t much reason for optimism in the short run. And the court’s direction could be determined by who gets to make the next couple of appointments; everything from a new liberal majority to a 7-2 or 8-1 conservative supermajority is possible in the coming years.
While neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump put climate change at the center of their campaigns, the climate kept intruding, whether in the form of wildfires or heatwaves or hurricanes. Just as those disasters are likely to worsen, the policy fights over climate in the next four years will intensify. When we look back, 2024 may or may not turn out to have been the most important election of our lifetimes. But either way it turns out, the consequences will be profound.
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.