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Though not, perhaps, the bad ideas you might expect.
Donald Trump will announce his running mate any day now, and according to multiple reports his choice has come down to Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. All erstwhile critics of Trump, they now share a fervent admiration for the former president they once scorned. But where do they stand on climate change?
Opinions on climate within the Republican Party are complex, and these three men reflect the divisions. According to Pew Research Center polls, 47% of Republicans over the age of 65 believe that human activity contributes a great deal or some to climate change, but a full 79% of Republicans under 30 think so. Yet only a tiny number of them feel any urgency around climate: In a Pew poll earlier this year, only 12% of Republicans said climate should be a top priority for the president and Congress, the lowest score of the 20 issues they asked about. (59% of Democrats said it should be a top priority.)
That leaves room for Republican politicians to take a variety of positions, as long as they agree that the ideas favored by climate hawks are bad. For many, the optimal position is a kind of malign neglect: They’ll admit that warming temperatures are bad, but somehow find their way to opposing all measures to address the problem. With one partial exception, that describes all of Trump’s likeliest running mates.
Burgum can be a little tough to pin down on climate, in large part because of how he shrewdly avoids talking about the issue in the culture-war terms so many in his party prefer. At the start of his second term he set a target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 — but without regulation or any reduction in fossil fuel production. Instead, Burgum wants the state to become a center for carbon capture, calling the room underground to store large amounts of carbon the state’s “geologic jackpot.”
As part of that project, Burgum has advocated the construction of a pipeline to carry CO2 into the state from other Midwest states, which he touts as simply a money-making proposition. “This has nothing to do with climate change,” he said in March. “This has to do with markets.” He has touted environmental, social, and governance-related investing, which focuses on companies with strong environmental records, as an opportunity for the state to lure capital — but has also joined with other Republican governors to condemn it.
Burgum has close ties with the oil industry, so much so that he has become Trump’s key liaison to the industry and its billionaire magnates; he has also been mentioned as a possible energy secretary if he is not Trump’s running mate, which would make him the administration’s chief fossil fuel advocate.
In other words, Burgum seems to be on multiple sides of the climate issue. He’s a fossil-fuel promoter and critic of electric vehicles who wants to make his state carbon neutral. And you will look in vain for any statement where Burgum says exactly what kind of threat he believes climate change poses, or even if he thinks it is happening at all; in technocratic style, he shifts any question on the issue to economic and practical concerns.
With its frequent hurricanes and dramatic sea level rise, Florida sees direct and repeated effects of climate change as much as any state in the country. Yet it took Marco Rubio many years to arrive at his current position: In the early part of his career he was a clear climate denier, but lately he has taken something more like the prevailing Republican view, which is that while climate change is happening and human activity may be contributing to it, we shouldn’t actually do much about it. At the very least, we shouldn’t do anything that comes with even the smallest cost in dollars or convenience.
During his first run for Senate in 2010, Rubio said, “The climate is always changing” — a common dodge among climate deniers, used to make them sound like they aren’t completely oblivious while they refuse to acknowledge the causes and consequences of post-industrialization warming. But “I don't think there's the scientific evidence to justify” the idea that humans have anything to do with it, he added.
He continued to hold that position for years. “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” he said in 2014. But over time, Rubio became less hesitant about admitting the reality of warming, even if he steered away from talking about the cause. He proposed modest measures to increase climate resilience, while always pairing them with attacks on more aggressive action as an attempt by leftist radicals to destroy the economy.
Today, Rubio is a member of the bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus, which has occasional meetings but steers away from taking any positions on particular legislation or regulations, making it mostly a way for senators to say “I care” without committing themselves to action.
When Vance talks about climate, it’s in the terms of a culture warrior, heaping contempt on liberals and their goals for a safer and cleaner environment. His 2022 Senate campaign against Democrat Tim Ryan featured substantial discussion of climate issues, with Vance regularly condemning efforts to reduce emissions and lamenting the decline of coal. “All of this ‘bring American manufacturing back’ from the Democrats is fake unless we stop the green energy fantasy,” he tweeted that July. “Solar panels can’t power a modern manufacturing economy. That’s why the Chinese are building coal power plants, something Tim Ryan’s donors won’t let America do.”
“If you want to make our environment more clean, the way to do it is to invest in Ohio natural gas,” he’s said. Or as he told Fox News, “The obsession Democrats have with eliminating fossil fuels is crazy.”
Like Trump, Vance has emphasized his loathing for electric vehicles. “Even if there was a climate crisis, I don’t know how the way to solve it is to buy more Chinese manufactured electric vehicles,” he said on a radio show in 2022 in response to the EV incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (which in fact requires that to qualify for subsidies vehicles must be mostly American-made with domestic materials; the requirements are complicated, but no Chinese vehicles qualify). “The whole EV thing is a scam, right?”
Always attuned to the value of a PR stunt, Vance introduced a bill he called the “Consequences for Climate Vandals Act,” meant to crack down on the scourge of climate activists throwing soup on paintings. Fox News was pleased, but the bill went nowhere, leaving America dangerously vulnerable to art-based climate protests.
This is the common thread running through Vance’s comments on climate: Unlike Rubio, who may have no choice but to discuss the effects of warming given the state he represents, Vance almost never mentions these effects. He turns any discussion of climate into an attack on liberals, environmentalists, and Democrats for their supposedly ruinous ideas to address the problem. If Burgum’s response to climate is Can we make money off this? and Rubio’s is It’s serious, but let’s not be hasty, Vance’s could be summed up as Go to hell, libs.
No matter who Trump picks, his vice president is unlikely to be anything but the most tentative voice of reason in the administration’s climate policy, even in the best of circumstances. None of these three has given us much reason to think he would risk his own position by standing in the way of what will no doubt be a determined effort to remove regulations on the fossil fuel industry, undo the carrot-based approach of the Biden administration to encouraging a green transition, and generally let the emissions rip. Or even that they’d want to.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.