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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.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said earlier this week that he had canceled more than 400 grants “across nine unnecessary programs.”
What were those unnecessary programs? Why were they deemed unnecessary? The Trump administration refuses to say.
This is the fourth round of grant cancellations that Zeldin, working “hand-in-hand” with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, has announced, which together will “save” the American people more than $1.9 billion in funds. After contacting the EPA four times over the course of a week for more information on the grants in question and getting no response at all, the agency finally instructed me to “refer to the March 10 announcement,” which doesn’t contain any additional details about which grants were canceled, “and to the Department of Government Efficiency’s webpage for additional updates.”
The efficiency department website has not yet been updated to reflect the more than 400 grants that were canceled on Monday. The previous rounds of cancellations are listed by date and amount, but there is no information about which programs the funds were from or whether they were already under contract.
“The claims of these grants being unnecessary, or wasteful, or saving American taxpayers funding, in my mind, is complete misinformation,” David Cash, the former EPA regional administrator for New England under the Biden administration, told me. “These grants were created because of statutes passed by Congress.”
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act gave the EPA more than $100 billion to spend across more than 70 programs. By the end of last year, about 88% of appropriated funds had been awarded to cities, states, tribes, researchers, nonprofits, and companies. “The EPA was given both the authority and the requirement to invest federal taxpayer dollars into projects that are going to bring down energy costs for families, grow clean energy jobs, make the air cleaner for communities,” said Cash. “The real savings are in energy costs that families would have been able to benefit from.”
Zeldin’s announcements are an escalation of President Trump’s “freeze” and review of funding for climate change and DEI-related programs. Despite a federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order on the freeze in February, followed by a preliminary injunction last week, the administration has continued to lock out grant recipients from the government’s payment system, and now, apparently, cancel grants altogether with no explanation. In refusing to comply with the court’s orders, Trump is teeing up a Supreme Court challenge to the Impoundment Control Act, a 50-year-old law that says the president can’t revoke funds without requesting permission from Congress.
Without knowing which grants Zeldin is trying to cancel, we can’t know for sure whether they would have helped consumers save money, created jobs, or produced cleaner air. But Zeldin appears to be scrubbing that last goal — arguably the entire purpose of the EPA — from the agency’s mission statement. On Wednesday, he announced a plan to “reconsider” dozens of environmental rules in “the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Since its inception, the EPA’s mission has been to “protect human health and the environment”; Zeldin, by contrast, said his priorities were to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
After scouring a social media-like feed on the efficiency department homepage, I found information on just two of the targeted grants:
A $3.2 million grant to a consulting firm to “develop a reporting system to collect data on Justice40, the EJ scorecard, and other EJECR reporting asks,” referring to two initiatives launched by the Biden administration to track where the benefits of clean energy are going, and to the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which Zeldin now plans to shutter.
A $4 million grant to provide materials “to increase workforce diversity in the construction materials sector.”
Cash questioned the logic of canceling an effort to track spending. “That makes for efficient government. We should know where we’re spending our money and the impact that it’s having,” he said. “And shouldn’t we want to be investing in those areas that have suffered the highest asthma rates or have had a history of water pollution? Why wouldn’t we want to invest in those communities?”
The sudden cancellation of billions of dollars in government funding with no disclosure as to what the money was earmarked for is in stark contrast to President Trump’s pledge to have “the most transparent Administration in history,” as well as the EPA’s assertion that it “is committed to accountability and transparency for the American people.”
The grant cancellations come on top of Zeldin’s much-publicized termination of the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program created by Congress to set up nonprofit lending authorities that would finance clean energy projects around the country. Zeldin claims to have “identified material deficiencies which pose an unacceptable risk to the lawful execution of these grants,” but has given no explanation as to what those deficiencies are. The closest thing to a suggestion of impropriety has been the fact that the money was being managed by an outside institution, an arrangement that the federal government has used to disburse funds for decades, including under the previous Trump administration.
In a letter to the Department of Justice and FBI on Tuesday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island requested evidence predicating a criminal investigation of the GGRF. He accused the Trump administration of “purposefully misusing the tools of law enforcement, and pursuing false allegations of criminal conduct, with the improper purpose to wrongfully freeze assets appropriated by Congress and obligated to designated recipients.”
Whitehouse held a hearing on Trump’s funding freeze on Wednesday, during which he accused Trump and Musk of “stealing from the American people to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy” and deeming this “gangster government.”
During the hearing, Caley Edgerly, the president and CEO of a bus dealership in Virginia, described the “chaos” caused by a freeze on grants for electric school buses. His company ordered 48 buses for five school districts that had been awarded funding. He’s worried about interest on those orders piling up, his ability to make payroll, and being left holding the bag. He’s also worried about the impact on manufacturers, who have invested in the materials, batteries, transmissions, and inverters to deliver on these electric bus orders. “The entire industry, all school bus manufacturers, by my estimation, has about a billion dollars invested in these materials,” he said. “They’re sitting on the shelf.” On top of that, he said, the local utility, Dominion, has spent about a million dollars on chargers for the school districts to charge the buses.
It’s unclear whether the electric bus grants that Edgerly discussed are among those Zeldin is attempting to cancel.
Current conditions: Health officials in Mumbai are warning vulnerable residents to take care as temperatures hover around 104 degrees Fahrenheit • Storm Konrad is battering Portugal and Spain with torrential rain • Cloudy weather is likely to spoil many Americans’ plans to catch tomorrow morning’s lunar eclipse.
THE TOP FIVE
1. EPA moves to roll back dozens of environmental regulations
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin yesterday launched an attack on U.S. environmental regulations, announcing a review of dozens of agency rules aimed at safeguarding the water and air, and the health of all Americans. In what he called the “biggest deregulation action in U.S. history,” Zeldin said he was “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” in the name of unleashing American energy and bringing down costs. As The New York Timesnoted, Zeldin’s announcement did not once refer to protecting the environment or public health, “twin tenets that have guided the agency since its founding in 1970.”
Among the many rules and regulations up for reconsideration are:
The “Good Neighbor Rule,” which protects Americans from air pollution from other states
Environmental advocates swiftly and forcefully condemned the announcement. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy called it “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”
Amanda Leland, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund, said “those seeking to make America healthier should be deeply concerned.”
Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said “the EPA has officially abandoned its mission to protect health and the environment.”
“The scale and scope and speed with which this administration is attacking environmental safeguards is unprecedented,” Jason Rylander, the legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute told NBC News.
2. EPA to review endangerment finding on greenhouse gases
One of the EPA’s most concerning announcements is its plan to reconsider the agency’s 2009 science-backed conclusion that six planet-warming gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, are a danger to public health. This finding is the basis for federal climate regulations, and gutting it would significantly curb the EPA’s ability to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Any attempt by the EPA to undo the endangerment finding will no doubt be met by legal challenges, and the agency would face an uphill battle to demonstrate that greenhouse gases are not a public health threat. “You’ve got to explain away decades of statements by every administration that there are negative consequences of climate change that can be reasonably anticipated,” Jonathan H. Adler, a conservative legal expert and professor of environmental law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told the Times.
3. Judge scoffs at EPA’s lack of evidence for canceling climate grants
There are a few updates on the Trump administration’s escalating battle against nonprofits that were granted some $20 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Documents show that Citibank, where the money was parked, was told to freeze the funds by the FBI, and the FBI is investigating the nonprofits for possible criminal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Earlier this week, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he had terminated the funds, which had been approved by Congress. Several of the grantees have launched lawsuits against the EPA and Citibank.
Yesterday a judge in one of the cases gave the administration until Monday to present evidence of fraud, waste, or abuse that justifies terminating the grant contracts. “You can’t even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan told a lawyer for the Trump administration during a hearing. “You have to have some kind of evidence.”
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4. DOT reportedly orders pause on green infrastructure projects
The Department of Transportation has reportedly told its officials to pause green infrastructure projects funded by Biden-era grants while the agency scrutinizes them to determine whether they “advance climate, equity, and other priorities counter to the administration's executive orders.” The review will identify for cancellation any projects aimed at “equity analysis, green infrastructure, bicycle infrastructure [and] EV and/or EV-charging infrastructure.”
5. Breakthrough Energy is closing its policy and advocacy arm
In case you missed it: Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported yesterday. The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations. More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership. “A major chapter in climate giving has ended,” Meyer said.
THE KICKER
A new four-lane highway is being carved through Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to make way for an influx of traffic from the COP30 climate summit in Belém later this year.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, TheWall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
