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It’s the Obama playbook, but different.
It was — against all odds — an energy debate.
Just look at the statistics. The word “fracking” was mentioned 10 times. “Oil” came up seven times. Even “climate change,” which Donald Trump was not very eager to talk about, was mentioned four times. And while that may not seem like a lot for such a vast and globe-spanning problem, climate change came up only three times in all of 2016’s debates combined.
Even more than when talking about trade or inflation, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump used energy to make their economic vision concrete and meaningful to Americans. For Harris, that meant recognizing the scale of the country’s fossil fuel resources today while gesturing toward a cleaner and lower-carbon future that will produce (in theory, at least) lots of high-wage manufacturing jobs for America’s middle class. For Trump, the energy industry — and, really, the fossil fuel industry — is central to his fleshy, authoritarian vision of American strength. Seemingly any attempt to replace hydrocarbons with something cleaner or less polluting arises from nothing less than an elite conspiracy to weaken the country and sell out its people.
For such a stark contrast — and for such an outlandish contrast, to be clear — it was a surprisingly substantive debate. Which isn’t to say we learned much, especially about Trump. The Republican nominee was the same man we’ve seen for the past nine years, the same politician who has defined the extreme GOP position on global warming. Over the past near-decade, Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and has seemed to revel in emissions-increasing policies. That isn’t changing. Asked directly what he would do about climate change on Tuesday night, he did not address the question at all. Instead, he talked about how car factories are getting built in Mexico, and he claimed in a difficult-to-follow rant that Joe Biden is getting paid off by China.
About Harris, we learned far more. Harris struck a careful, moderate tone during the debate between the need for climate action and the ongoing importance of fossil fuel extraction. She spoke about the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate policy, but also discussed how it increased federal leasing for oil and gas. She spoke about climate change in terms of its higher everyday costs for Americans, and not — as Biden did — as an existential threat to the country.
“What we know is that [climate change] is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or [it] is being jacked up.”
She bragged about the Biden administration’s oil and gas record in the same breath as she discussed its enormous investments in clean energy. American oil and gas production is at an all-time high — it is higher, in fact, than Saudi Arabia’s — but I can’t remember hearing a Biden administration official bragging about that.
“I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” she said.
In a way, Harris has essentially returned to Obama’s 2012 “all of the above” energy policy. That approach remains unpopular with climate activists, who think it did too much for the oil and gas industry; personally, I think it’s an open question whether Obama actually believed in the “all of the above” approach or was subtly trying to help renewables all along. But more importantly, the underlying policy context is totally different now than it was 12 years ago: With the Inflation Reduction Act in place, the government can more easily bless all forms of energy development because it is, in fact, helping clean energy take root.
What’s most important, though — and what I hope climate advocates do not overlook — is that Harris’s tack here reflects the broad state of American public opinion. While most Americans want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they do not seem to want an energy revolution: More than two-thirds of Americans believe the country should use a mix of renewables and fossil fuels, according to the Pew Research Center, and less than a third believe the country should rely “entirely” on renewables. In the same poll, most Americans said they oppose federal rules that would aim to make electric vehicles half of all new cars sold by 2032.
This is not to say that Americans are big oil lovers. Most Americans think the country should prioritize various forms of zero-carbon energy development over fossil fuels. And while Republican support for renewables has dropped over the past few years — and has fallen further over the past few months, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently — a generation gap has emerged wherein younger Republicans are much more likely to champion solar and wind than older party members.
Even among seemingly environmental-aligned demographics, greater support exists for fossil fuels than one might expect. Most Democrats say they would not “favor” expanding fracking or offshore drilling — but about a quarter of Democrats would favor more fossil fuel drilling. So would roughly 45% of independents and, of course, a large majority of Republicans, according to Pew.
Of course, these facts of public opinion sit uneasily with what we know about climate change, which is that greenhouse gas emissions — and fossil fuel development with it — should plan to scale down soon. The International Energy Association has said that the most likely pathway for keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius requires the development of “no new long lead-time upstream oil or gas projects.” This observation provides less guidance for American policy makers than it might initially seem, because it is really focused on the opening of new, massive oil fields like Guyana’s. (The IEA also says, in almost the same breath, that “continued investment is required in some existing oil and gas projects,” which could possibly justify ongoing extraction from Texas’s well-established oil and gas fields.)
But even then, the non-negotiable fact would remain: The world must move away from fossil fuels. And the American people are not generally ready to do that today. The country wants something closer to an “all of the above” strategy than it wants a Green New Deal.
That strategy brings climate policy out of the ideological realm and into the pragmatic. Americans, polling suggests, like renewables in part because they will let the United States reduce its dependence on foreign oil, a popular idea in and of itself and talking point of both parties going back decades.
When Heatmap polled more than 5,000 Americans last month, more than half said that a “strong benefit” of a given clean energy project would be its ability to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil and natural gas. Among respondents, those putative energy independence benefits were the No. 2 most popular reason to support clean energy; the only more popular rationale for backing a project was that it would cut utility bills.
Harris directly echoed that appeal on Tuesday. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”
I can’t remember Biden making an appeal like this. When he talks about clean energy or the IRA, he tends to focus on its potential to grow the economy. Harris did some of that on Tuesday, bragging about the 800,000 new manufacturing jobs created during her vice presidency. But her focus on the national interest — and on the Biden administration’s appreciation of the ongoing fossil boom — was new.
Such an approach is unlikely to help her appeal to climate activists and advocates, who want the government to affirmatively begin to shutter fossil capacity. The Sunrise Movement, a climate activist group, criticized Harris on Tuesday for spending “more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future.”
What I’d advise those advocates to keep in mind is that their views are legitimately not very popular, and Harris is trying to win a very close election in a race that her team believes has potentially existential stakes for American democracy. She also remembers the 2020 primary, when she tacked left on virtually every issue — she promised to ban fracking, for instance — and still lost. (If that’s because many of the groups wound up backing Bernie Sanders in that primary, that only reinforces the view that she can’t win over those voters in the first place.)
Harris isn’t defying the left on every issue — she has resisted neoliberal dogma and pandered to the public’s views on price gouging, for instance, putting her more in line with the Democratic Party’s Elizabeth Warren wing. But unlike Biden, she refuses to pay an electoral price for backing left-wing policies. Indeed, she seems to believe that she cannot pay such a price and still win. If Harris is now bragging about her administration’s support for fossil fuels, if she is casting the Inflation Reduction Act as a law that helped fracking, that means climate activists have much more work to do to persuade the public on what they believe. The Democratic Party’s candidate will not do that persuasion for them. And in any case, activists are not going to convince the public to believe something in the next 54 days that they’ve failed to do in the past five years.
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Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.