You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
What even is “energy independence”?
For being so cozy with (not to mention bankrolled by) the oil and gas industry, Donald Trump still manages to get a lot wrong about the world’s dominant petroleum industry. Here’s everything he’s gotten wrong, and occasionally right, about the oil and gas industry while on the 2024 campaign trail.
“On January 6, we were energy independent.” [June 27, 2024]
Fact check: What does “energy independence” actually mean? Experts frequently dismiss the term as a political buzzword that isn’t helpful for understanding the United States’ position in the global energy market.
According to one definition, “energy independence” means that the United States produces more energy than it consumes. By this metric, the U.S. became energy independent in 2019, during the Trump administration, for the first time in 40 years, though it was the cumulative result of the shale boom that started in 2005 and stretched across three presidential administrations. By this same metric, U.S. “energy independence” actually reached its highest level in 70 years in 2022 under President Biden, not Trump.
Another way to define “energy independence” would be that the U.S. doesn’t import any energy. This definition would also make Trump’s statement inaccurate: In 2020 under Trump, the U.S. imported 7.9 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day. In 2023, under Biden, that number rose to 8.51 million barrels per day. Under both Trump and Biden, the U.S. has been a net exporter of oil products due in large part to its processing of crude oil. Check out this visualization from the U.S. from the Energy Information Administration for more granular detail on U.S. petroleum flows.
“We’re refining the oil. We have our refinery for that oil. It’s really, I call it tar. It’s not oil. It’s terrible. We have real stuff, but we’re refining it in Houston. So for all of the environmentalists, you ought to look at that because all of that tar is going right up into the atmosphere. You just ought to take a look. It’s the only plant that can do it. We have the only plants that can take tar and make it into oil.” [ March 6, 2024]
Fact check: Just because Trump decides to call something “tar” doesn’t mean it actually is tar. What he seems to be talking about here are the Canadian oil sands, sometimes called tar sands, which contain bitumen. The heavy, dirty, and diluted crude oil is transported via rail and pipeline from Canada to Texas, which is where most (but contrary to Trump’s claim, not all) of the world’s specialized heavy oil refineries are located.
Extracting, transporting, and refining bitumen is a pollution-heavy process. “All of that tar” doesn’t literally go “right up into the atmosphere,” but the refining process does emit benzene, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide, which are known to increase instances of cancer, asthma, and other health conditions in the people who live or work nearby.
“Just yesterday, Biden blocked the export of American natural gas to other countries … Now, why he stopped it, I guess it was the environmentalists. I guess. But it’s good for the environment, not bad. And it’s good for our country. I will approve the export terminals on my very first day back.” [Jan. 27, 2024]
Fact check: This is wrong in a number of ways. Let’s take it from the top: First, Biden did not block the export of liquified natural gas to other countries; he temporarily paused the approval of new licenses to export LNG, including 17 that had been in the, er, pipeline. The United States is already the top exporter of LNG in the world, with output expected to double by the end of the decade from projects that are already licensed and under construction. The LNG licensing pause “will not impact our ability to continue supplying LNG to our allies in the near-term,” the Biden administration has said; current exports have been more than enough to meet Europe’s needs so far, even accounting for the war in Ukraine.
The permitting process will resume once the Department of Energy has updated its criteria for determining whether new LNG export terminals are in the “public interest” once their climate impacts are considered.
Now, about those climate impacts: It’s true that natural gas burns “cleaner” than coal, producing about 40% less carbon dioxide (and about 30% less than oil). But natural gas is also largely composed of methane, “a climate-altering super pollutant,” Jeremy Symons, an environmental and political analyst and strategist, told Heatmap.
While methane breaks down more quickly in the atmosphere than CO2, it also traps more heat — about 80 times more heat over the course of 20 years. The process of liquifying natural gas not only requires additional energy, it also introduces new opportunities for methane to leak, adding to the fuel’s climate impacts. Once all those leaks have been quantified, argues Cornell University researcher Robert Howarth, LNG is not only not beneficial to the environment, it’s actually worse than other fossil fuels. Howarth’s paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, and some have questioned his conclusions in the past. But there’s no question that building new LNG facilities will lock the U.S. into producing planet-warming fuel for years to come.
LNG certainly isn’t “good for the environment” of the people who live near fracking sites and export terminals, either, where health issues are rampant. In addition to methane, LNG plants release volatile organic compounds, which have been linked to higher instances of cancer, asthma, and birth defects.
“You have the highest energy costs in the entire country. In the first year, they’re going to be reduced by 50% because we’re going to drill, baby, drill.” [Jan. 23, 2024]
Fact check: Trump made these remarks after winning the New Hampshire primary — and they’re wrong. For one thing, while energy is expensive in the Granite State, New Hampshire’s Department of Energy says its energy costs are the fifth-highest in the lower 48.
There’s an even bigger fallacy in Trump’s statement, though: that drilling can quickly lower energy prices. For one thing, oil from new leases doesn’t hit the market for at least four years, according to the Government Accountability Office. (Offshore drilling takes even longer since building the rigs alone can take two to three years.) As NPR explains, there are also operational limits; drilling new wells is “not as simple as turning a spigot and watching oil gush out.”
Much to the dismay of environmentalists, the Biden administration has also been keeping pace with Trump’s historic drilling. In fact, as of 2024, the U.S. is producing more domestic crude than at any point during Trump’s presidency.
But even with all this new domestic crude, the U.S. is still susceptible to fluctuations in the global price of oil. That’s partially because the U.S. imports a different kind of oil than it exports — what those in the trade call light, sweet crude, compared to the gunkier, heavy crude most U.S. refineries are set up for. Reconfiguring refineries to handle the light crude oil “could underserve some product markets and idle (or even strand) the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in refinery conversion capacity,” the American Petroleum Institute warns. Plus, it would also take even more time.
All that means that the U.S. is stuck relying on importing and exporting oil even if domestic production ramps up even more than it already has. And that, in turn, means we’re at the mercy of fluctuations in global energy costs, which remain out of the White House’s singular control.
One more thing to note: “The oil industry can decide to produce more oil whenever it wants,” the Center for American Progress, a liberal public policy think tank, explains, noting that the oil industry is sitting on “more than 9,000 approved — but unused — drilling permits on federal lands.” This is the base of the criticism that the oil industry is raking in “unprecedented profits” and burdening Americans with an artificially high cost of energy.
“Energy caused inflation, and energy has destroyed many families. Energy is considered very strongly. Energy is considered a country killer.” [Dec. 17, 2023]
Fact check: Economists mostly agree that “energy caused” the spike in inflation that we’ve seen since 2020, so in that sense, Trump is correct. But in making this argument, he inadvertently endorses the case for clean energy — since renewables aren’t subject to the same kinds of supply volatility as fossil fuels, they are therefore considered intrinsically deflationary.
“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and others for oil. ‘Please, please, please help us,’ Joe Biden says, and yet we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country anywhere in the world. We are a nation that just recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia will be reducing their oil production while at the same time substantially increasing the price. And we met that threat by announcing that we will no longer be drilling for oil in large areas in Alaska or elsewhere, anywhere in our states. We are a nation that is consumed by the radical left’s Green New Deal, yet everyone knows that the Green New Deal is fake. It is really the green new scam.” [Dec. 17, 2023]
Fact check: First, the United States is the top oil-producing country globally, followed by Russia and Saudi Arabia. It is true that the U.S. eased oil sanctions on Venezuela late last year, though that reprieve was explicitly temporary and contingent on the country holding free and fair elections.
Trump also appears to be referencing the Biden administration’s recent decision to cancel oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and block 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska from new drilling. While that does qualify as a large area in Alaska, the moves notably do not stop ConocoPhillips’ controversial Willow drilling project from going forward.
Trump further seems to be alluding to Biden’s campaign promise to not approve any new drilling (“ ...anywhere in our states!”), but that hasn’t exactly gone to plan; although Biden issued a pause on new oil and gas leases on federal lands one week after taking office, the administration then lifted that pause a little over a year later in the face of numerous legal and political challenges. Over the summer, however, the Interior Department did raise the cost of drilling on federal lands.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.