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The man who famously called climate change a “Chinese hoax” and pulled the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement reportedly faces 30 counts of business fraud.
On Thursday, a Manhattan grand jury reportedly indicted former President Donald Trump — who famously called climate change a “Chinese hoax,” pulled the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, gutted the Clean Water Act, and removed protections from more U.S. lands than President Teddy Roosevelt protected — over an improper payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign, according to three people with knowledge of the matter who spoke with The New York Times. CNN reports he faces more than 30 counts of business fraud.
The decision, likely to be unsealed in the coming days, marks not just a seismic moment for American history — among his inglorious distinctions, Trump will now become the first former president to face felony criminal charges — but for the 2024 presidential campaign and potentially the future of the planet.
As many in the media have pointed out to breathless courthouse watchers in the days since Trump prematurely predicted his arrest, a criminal record does not prevent him from running for office again; NPR reminds readers that President Ulysses S. Grant was arrested in 1872 for speeding — in a horsedrawn carriage — the same year he’d go on to win re-election. But that won’t prevent Trump from being read his Miranda rights, from being photographed, from being fingerprinted, and perhaps from being handcuffed and perp-walked as well.
So, yes, there’s a bit of schadenfreude at work here.
After losing the 2020 election, Trump used his chaotic final days in office to cram through as many environmental rollbacks as possible, ranging from expediting approvals for the energy development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; to the Interior adopting less-severe meteorological models out of a disingenuous concern over the “uncertainty” of climate science; to overturning Obama-era restrictions on CO2 emissions from power plants; to trimming protections and habitat for the threatened northern spotted owl. Many of these gestures weren’t actually consequential or meaningful and were swiftly overturned by President Biden, who also used his first day in office to rejoin the Paris Agreement. Rather, Trump’s eleventh-hour rollbacks seemed almost more intended as a middle finger to the “haters and losers” on the left and their precious climate concerns (particularly so when his moves are viewed in contrast to Democratic predecessors who used their outgoing days in office to dedicate new protected lands).
That makes what happens next of particularly heightened interest for those concerned about the climate. There is already an obvious “revenge tour” theme to Trump’s 2024 campaign, and one of Trump’s favorite punching bags historically has been the planet. He’s already set his sights on it as a target, vowing at his recent Waco, Texas, rally that “proud Texas energy workers will once again be pumping, producing, and refining Texas oil and gas to turn America into the number one energy superpower on Earth,” insisting that “the Green New Deal will lead to our destruction,” and piling onto his bizarre ongoing campaign against EVs by complaining they “can’t go far, cost too much, and [use batteries] produced in China … when an unlimited amount of gasoline is available inexpensively in the United States of America.” But that doesn’t even scratch the surface of “the climate and energy scenario in Trump II,” as Josh Freed of Third Way, a center-left think tank, had ominously warned Vox ahead of the 2020 election.
Perhaps nothing is more concerning than the looming specter of the return of David Bernhardt, a climate crisis denier and former oil lobbyist. Formerly the U.S. secretary of the Interior, Bernhardt is one of the rare administrators who Trump still likes and who seems potentially willing to rejoin a hypothetical Trump administration; Brooke Rollins, the president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank that promotes Trump’s policy agenda, specifically named Bernhardt to Newsweek as “an example of the sort of people who are likely to be reinstalled and who now better know their way around government.”
Between joining the Trump administration in August 2017 and being named to lead the office in early 2019, the Interior Department “either begun or completed at least 19 policy actions requested or supported by at least 16 of Bernhardt’s former lobbying clients, including oil, gas and mining companies and their trade associations,” Inside Climate News wrote at the time. (The Washington Postreported that Bernhardt had so many potential conflicts of interest, he had to literally carry around a list of their names to remember them all). At Trump's direction and under Bernhardt's leadership, it seems very likely the United States would undo all of the monumental progress it’s painstakingly made toward the green transition.
However, Trump is not likely thinking about the planet, or even oil and gas and mining, right now. Somewhere in Florida, he’ll be busy with his attorneys. But very soon, those conversations will be replaced by ones with his strategists — fine-tuning how to spin his arrest, how to make him out as the victim, and how to goad his supporters into outrage.
And soon after that, either with the power that comes from being the former president of the United States with millions of still-devoted followers, or with the power that comes from retaking the White House, Trump will once again set his sights on exacting his punishment on those who dared to cross him. His list of grievances is long, and it's growing. And after everything, the planet might still be in his hands.
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On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.