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When Donald Trump met with a group of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago last month, his message was somewhere between “refreshingly blunt” and “blatant shakedown.” Attendees
spilled to The Washington Post that Trump told the executives they should raise a billion dollars for his campaign so he could make them even richer by reducing their taxes and removing regulations on their industry.
One can’t help but wonder if any of them thought to themselves that as appealing as that kind of deal might be, there’s no reason for them to be desperate. After all, the Biden years have actually been quite good for the fossil fuel industry.
That applies to the fossil fuel industry’s political allies as well: While Republicans are appalled at the enormous sums the administration and congressional Democrats have directed to renewable energy development and other climate-focused programs, fossil fuels are doing just fine. In the immediate term, the president’s political opponents can barely find anything to complain about, which was probably key to the Biden administration’s political strategy all along.
Republican frustration was on clear display at a
hearing Thursday of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, where GOP members went through the motions of grilling Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm over what they like to call “the Biden administration’s war on energy.” Their attempts to portray the administration’s throttling the production of fossil fuels were so absurd that at times Granholm seemed to struggle to keep from laughing out loud. One member was upset about the demise of incandescent light bulbs. Another said they “know a guy” who, for some reason, had to pay $8,000 to put an electric vehicle charger in his garage (the secretary was at a loss to explain that). And a third wanted to know whether the DOE is reverse-engineering technology from unidentified aerial phenomena, what we used to refer to call UFOs (the secretary didn’t give much of an answer — clearly she’s in on the conspiracy).
“Can you clarify whether the Department of Energy has been involved in any such efforts either historically or currently to analyze reverse-engineering materials from or related to UAPs?” asked Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida.
“I have no knowledge of that,” Granholm replied.
“There have been documented sightings of metallic spheres over DOE facilities,” Luna continued later. “What investigations have been conducted in regards to these sightings and what conclusions do you guys have about the nature and origins of these objects?”
“I’d be happy to follow up with you on that,” Granholm replied diplomatically.
Predictable congressional buffoonery notwithstanding, this is the curious situation in which we find ourselves: On one hand, this administration has done more to advance green energy than any that came before. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was the most significant piece of climate legislation in history, and if the administration’s climate initiatives are successful, this could be the key turning point in America’s contribution to climate change. On the other hand, the U.S. has never exported more oil than it
did last year and overtook Australia and Qatar to become the world’s leading producer of liquified natural gas. The fossil fuel industry has been booming since Joe Biden took office, and still is.
The immediate topic of the Oversight Committee hearing was the administration’s decision to pause new approvals for liquid natural gas export projects so it can complete a review of the analysis that underpins those approvals. The pause doesn’t affect existing exports or projects under construction, but it has been hailed by many climate activists as an important step in the right direction.
The administration has
framed the pause in the context of its climate efforts, and the environmental impact of LNG is complicated; while burning gas creates lower emissions than burning coal or oil, the processes involved in exporting LNG — lowering the temperature of the gas until it becomes a liquid, moving it onto boats, moving the boats across the ocean, turning the liquid back into a gas — create their own emissions that make LNG not a particularly climate-friendly option.
In addition, there’s the question of environmental justice. “It is deeply disturbing to me that fossil fuel production is at a record high under the current administration,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib at the hearing, noting the high rates of asthma and cancer in the area she grew up in and represents in Detroit. “LNG exports perpetuate, I think, systematic environmental racism,” she said, noting that the processing facilities are often sited in areas that are mostly minority and poor.
Nevertheless, the temporary pause on new approvals won’t hinder the booming LNG industry much, especially in the short run. As Granholm said, “We have exploded in our authorizations. This pause only applies to new ones coming down the pike.” The U.S. exported 88.9 million metric tons of LNG
in 2023; just eight years ago exports were almost nothing.
And yet keep repeating “War on energy!” knowing that facts seldom play too much of a role in political persuasion.
Polling shows that more voters trust Donald Trump on a range of questions related to energy production and prices, and the imaginary lack of fossil fuel production is such an urgent problem to solve that Trump has promised that he will be a dictator on “day one” in order to do two things: “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
It can appear to be the best of both worlds for Republicans: They get the fossil fuel production they want, and outside of a hearing room where they can be directly shot down, they can still make at least some political hay out of energy. They would probably add that while oil and gas production is up at the moment, Democrats are still hoping to phase out fossil fuels over the long run. Which is true.
Democrats have the harder political task: They want to show that they’re addressing climate change, but in a way that doesn’t cause any inconvenience or higher retail prices for gasoline. That has always been part of the green energy dream — that we could get more energy for less money, even as we’re saving the planet. In some ways that’s what’s happening as the price of renewables has continued to drop. But all it takes is a momentary spike in gasoline prices to send angry voters back into the arms of whoever promises to bring them down.
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.”
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.
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.
Activists came together on Earth Day to protest the Trump administration’s decision to issue a stop work order on Equinor’s Empire Wind project. It’s the most notable rally for offshore wind I’ve seen since September, when wind advocates protested offshore opponents at the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island.
Esther Rosario, executive director of Climate Jobs New York, told me the rally was intended to focus on the jobs that will be impacted by halting construction and that about a hundred people were at the rally – “a good half of them” union members or representing their unions.
“I think it’s important that the elected officials that are in both the area and at the federal level understand the humans behind what it means to issue a stop-work order,” she said.
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.
The city is currently taking public comments. We’ll know more in mid-May.
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.
The project, according to media reports, only received one public comment at a recent hearing before the Public Service Commission – and it was in support.
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.”
This isn’t a surprising outcome: Heatmap Pro data shows Stark County has a 98 opposition index.
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.
Redwood will have additional conditions placed on the project, including a requirement to follow current and future fire codes, which is becoming a more common mandate for battery storage overall.
