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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 Post reported 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 federal layoffs, copper tariffs, and Texas flood costs
Current conditions: Three people were killed in southern New Mexico after heavy rains on Tuesday caused flooding • Parts of the western Mediterranean Sea are 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average • Search operations are underway for 30 people missing in India’s Himachal Pradesh state following flash floods and landslides.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted a lower court ruling that had blocked mass layoffs of federal workers, clearing the way for a significant reduction in the civil service. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only dissenting vote, writing that the court had a “demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.” Technically, SCOTUS’ ruling is only temporary, and the case could eventually return for the court to consider at a later date, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor noting, “The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.” But “in practice,” the court’s move allows President Trump to “pursue his restructuring plans, even if judges later determine that they exceed presidential power,” The New York Times writes.
The Trump administration has signaled its intention to reduce the workforce by 107,000 employees in the next fiscal year. It plans the steepest cuts for the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, and the General Services Administration, but roles at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy are also up for reductions. As I’ve previously written, such cuts to the civil service will long outlast President Trump. “It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to restore the kind of institutional knowledge that’s being lost,” Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal government workers, told me.
President Trump announced on Tuesday that he intends to impose a 50% tariff on copper, a move that follows earlier tariffs on steel and aluminum. The process for imposing those tariffs, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin notes, involves recognizing that the product being tariffed is “essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.” But while a steep new tariff could incentivize increased copper mining in the United States, such mines can take years to open, and copper must be smelted and refined before it can be used — an industry that is currently at capacity in the U.S. and dominated by China. Nevertheless, copper is crucial for “a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors,” Matthew writes. “Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average.”
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The death toll in the Texas floods rose to over 100 on Tuesday, with Governor Greg Abbott telling reporters that another 161 people remain unaccounted for in Kerr County. Already one of the deadliest floods in modern U.S. history, the disaster is also set to be one of the costliest, with AccuWeather estimating total damage and economic loss between $18 billion and $22 billion. “The damage, impacts on future tourism, cost of search and recovery efforts, extensive cleanup that will be needed, as well as insurance claims after this catastrophic flash flood, will have long-lasting economic impacts in the Hill Country region of Texas,” AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter said in a statement.
As I wrote on Tuesday, the Texas floods were a disaster despite the forecasting, not because of it. While some global weather models underestimated the storm, NOAA’s cutting-edge specialized models “got this right,” UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist Daniel Swain told me. Funding for those models — as well as research into severe thunderstorms and rainstorms like the one in Texas — is set to be zeroed out in the Trump administration’s 2026 budget.
The Department of Energy has hired three scientists who are among the minority of experts to doubt or downplay the impacts of human activity on global warming, The New York Times has learned. The scientists include physicist Steven E. Koonin, the author of the bestselling book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters, which has been criticized for “not [comporting] with the evidence”; meteorologist Roy Spencer, the author of The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists, which alleges IPCC researchers made a “mix-up between cause and effect when analyzing cloud and temperature variations”; and atmospheric scientist John Christy, who’s been accused of using misleading graphs to downplay the extent of human activity on climate change. The New York Times was unable to immediately learn “what the three scientists were working on or whether they were being paid,” but the hires come at a time when the federal government is also laying off long-tenured climate and atmospheric scientists as well as removing mentions of climate change from government websites.
China is constructing nearly three-quarters of all solar and wind power projects being built globally, according to a new report by the Global Energy Monitor. Of about 689 gigawatts currently under construction worldwide, 510 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind were within China’s borders, the report found. Additionally, China accounts for 29% of all planned wind and solar projects worldwide, followed closest by Brazil, at just over 9%.
China’s wind and solar capacity surpassed its coal and gas capacity for the first time during the first quarter of 2025, supplying 23% of the country’s electricity consumption, the report adds. Even offshore wind, a “small portion of China’s overall renewable capacity,” now contributes over 50% of the overall offshore wind capacity in construction worldwide. You can read the full report here.
Image: Studio Pizza/Unsplash
Cemeteries are “a mosaic of different habitats. This means that species from forests, hedgerows, grasslands, and even fields can find substitute habitats there.” —Ingo Kowarik, an urban ecologist and retired professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, on the burgeoning field of cemetery biodiversity.
Jesse and Rob go back to basics on the steam engine.
Just two types of machines have produced the overwhelming majority of electricity generated since 1890. This week, we look at the history of those devices, how they work — and how they have contributed to global warming.
This is our second episode of Shift Key Summer School, a series of “lecture conversations” about the basics of energy, electricity, and the power grid for listeners of all backgrounds. This week, we dive into the invention and engineering of the world’s most common types of fossil- and nuclear-fueled power plants. What’s a Rankine cycle power station, and how does it use steam to produce electricity? How did the invention of the jet engine enable the rise of natural gas-generated electricity? And why can natural gas power plants achieve much higher efficiency gains than coal plants?
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It’s interesting thinking about the deployment of steam and these Rankine cycle generators in the late 19th century for us as people who care about the power grid. These are interesting techniques as they’re deploying electricity for the first time. But the use of coal to convert water into steam and the use of steam power actually comes way earlier than any of this, right? Like, it’s steam. That is actually the 19th century — the core 19th century and late 19th century, especially — energy medium. And actually, the history of the 19th century energy is switching from wood and hydropower to coal-powered steam.
And already by the time that the Pearl Street station is built in New York, the United States is crisscrossed with steam engines. Our economy already runs on steam. It’s actually the application of steam and coal — which at that point are kind of old and fundamental technologies to economic function — to power generation. They didn’t have to make any huge discoveries around steam and coal. They were already using steam and coal in factories, they just weren’t intermediating it through the electricity grid.
Jesse Jenkins: That’s right. And in all these cases, you’re just trying to convert that steam, the expansion of that steam, into motion, whether that’s the pistons of a steam engine or the pistons of a reciprocating generator attached to a dynamo in Pearl Street, or, in a lot of factories, just a bunch of belts, right? That would then move equipment throughout the facility. It’s just a lot easier to move energy around, and more precise to do that as electricity. And so over time, the devices in industrial facilities all converted over to using electricity directly, and then you could generate your energy somewhere far away.
And this is the other, second advantage of steam turbines. What made Westinghouse so successful is that they have large economies of scale, so it’s a lot cheaper to generate power from a big steam turbine than the equivalent amount of power from a lot of little steam engines. And that wasn’t … I mean, that’s true for reciprocating engines, but they kind of top out, given their complexity.
The Pearl Strait station generators were in the 100-kilowatt scale. I think there were six of them, originally, so 600 kilowatts, and they only powered a few hundred lights, which is remarkable. These lights, the original lights, were incredibly inefficient, so it took something like 1,000 watts or more per light bulb. Whereas again, now we’re down to like, 10 to 15 watts in an efficient LED bulb. But anyway, they were in that kind of hundreds of watts scale, and that kind of maxed out the scale of the reciprocating engines. Steam turbines you could increase and increase and increase into the megawatt scale, and by doing that utilities or generators were able to lower the cost of energy while expanding customer bases.
Mentioned:
Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, by Alexis Madrigal
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The Senate told renewables developers they’d have a year to start construction and still claim a tax break. Then came an executive order.
Renewable energy advocates breathed a sigh of relief after a last-minute change to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act stipulated that wind and solar projects would be eligible for tax credits as long as they began construction within the next 12 months.
But the new law left an opening for the Trump administration to cut that window short, and now Trump is moving to do just that. The president signed an executive order on Monday directing the Treasury Department to issue new guidance for the clean electricity tax credits “restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
The broad safe harbors in question have to do with the way the government defines the “beginning of construction,” which, in the realm of federal tax credits, is a term of art. Under the current Treasury guidance, developers must either complete “physical work of a significant nature” on a given project or spend at least 5% of its total cost to prove they have started construction during a given year, and are therefore protected from any subsequent tax law changes.
As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin previously reported, oftentimes something as simple as placing an order for certain pieces of equipment, like transformers or solar trackers, will check the box. Still, companies can’t just buy a bunch of equipment to qualify for the tax credits and then sit on it indefinitely. Their projects must be up and operating within four years, or else they must demonstrate “continuous progress” each year to continue to qualify.
As such, under existing rules and Trump’s new law, wind and solar developers would have 12 months to claim eligibility for the investment or production tax credit, and then at least four years to build the project and connect it to the grid. While a year is a much shorter runway than the open-ended extension to the tax credits granted by the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s a much better deal than the House’s original version of the OBBBA, which would have required projects to start construction within two months and be operating by the end of 2028 to qualify.
Or so it seemed.
The tax credits became a key bargaining chip during the final negotiations on the bill. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska fought to retain the 12-month runway for wind and solar, while members of the House Freedom Caucus sought to kill it. Ultimately, the latter group agreed to vote yes after winning assurances from the president that he would “deal” with the subsidies later.
Last week, as all of this was unfolding, I started to hear rumors that the Treasury guidance regarding “beginning of construction” could be a key tool at the president’s disposal to make good on his promise. Industry groups had urged Congress to codify the existing guidance in the bill, but it was ultimately left out.
When I reached out to David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in energy tax credits, on Thursday, he was already contemplating Trump’s options to exploit that omission.
Burton told me that Trump’s Treasury department could redefine “beginning of construction” in a number of ways, such as by removing the 5% spending safe harbor or requiring companies to get certain permits in order to demonstrate “significant” physical work. It could also shorten the four-year grace period to bring a project to completion.
But Burton was skeptical that the Treasury Department had the staff or expertise to do the work of rewriting the guidance, let alone that Trump would make this a priority. “Does Treasury really want to spend the next couple of months dealing with this?” he said. “Or would it rather deal with implementing bonus depreciation and other taxpayer-favorable rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill instead of being stuck on this tangent, which will be quite a heavy lift and take some time?”
Just days after signing the bill into law, Trump chose the tangent, directing the Treasury to produce new guidance within 45 days. “It’s going to need every one of those days to come out with thoughtful guidance that can actually be applied by taxpayers,” Burton told me when I called him back on Monday night.
The executive order cites “energy dominance, national security, economic growth, and the fiscal health of the Nation” as reasons to end subsidies for wind and solar. The climate advocacy group Evergreen Action said it would help none of these objectives. “Trump is once again abusing his power in a blatant end-run around Congress — and even his own party,” Lena Moffit, the group’s executive director said in a statement. “He’s directing the government to sabotage the very industries that are lowering utility bills, creating jobs, and securing our energy independence.”
Industry groups were still assessing the implications of the executive order, and the ones I reached out to declined to comment for this story. “Now we’re circling the wagons back up to dig into the details,” one industry representative told me, adding that it was “shocking” that Trump would “seemingly double cross Senate leadership and Thune in particular.”
As everyone waits to see what Treasury officials come up with, developers will be racing to “start construction” as defined by the current rules, Burton said. It would be “quite unusual” if the new guidance were retroactive, he added. Although given Trump’s history, he said, “I guess anything is possible.”