Sparks
Trump’s Offshore Wind Ban Is Coming, Congressman Says
Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
The island is home to one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world.
Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.
The Santa Ana winds are carrying some of the smoke out to sea.
A pre-print study from smoke researcher Marshall Burke and others shows how fires are eating into air quality gains.
Low-flow showerheads, electric heaters, and, of course, wind turbines all came in for a drubbing.
Americans love their public lands — particularly Americans living in the West, where easy access to the region’s undeveloped forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, and lakes is a point of identity and pride. But on Friday, in its first action as a voting body, the House of Representatives for the 119th Congress approved a rules package that reintroduces a provision making it easier for lawmakers to cede control of federal lands to local authorities. That, in turn, could result in vast swaths of the West being opened up to drilling or auctioned off to private owners, according to critics.
“It’s an obscure provision that [Congress] is using to essentially obfuscate the paving of the way towards selling off federal public lands,” Michael Carroll, the BLM Campaign Director at the Wilderness Society, told me of the rulemaking maneuver.
Republicans have tried this before. In 2017, during the party’s trifecta, the House approved a rules package with a near-identical provision that essentially declared that public lands do not have a budgetary value that needs to be accounted for when they’re sold, streamlining potential handovers. New Mexico Democratic Representative Raúl Grijalva described the provision at the time as allowing Congress to “give away every single piece of property we own, for free, and pretend we have lost nothing of any value.”
Utah Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz subsequently attempted to take advantage of the provision by introducing legislation that would have transferred 3 million acres of Western federal land to state control — a bill that was met by so much opposition from hunters, anglers, and his own furious constituents that he ultimately withdrew it.
The provision briefly disappeared from the rules packages of the 116th and 117th Congresses, when the House was controlled by Democrats, then reappeared again in 2023, when Congress was split but the House was in Republican control. But to advocates for public lands, the provision’s inclusion in the 119th Congress’ rules seems like a mere extension and more like a tactical teeing-up for the incoming Republican trifecta. “Utah politicians aren’t stupid. They learn from their mistakes,” Carroll said.
He described an anticipated three-pronged approach to land privatization headed into 2024: the judiciary route, with the Supreme Court poised to decide whether or not to hear a Utah lawsuit over the constitutionality of federal control of BLM lands later thisweek; the legislative route, which began with Friday’s rule package; and the administrative route, with Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who supports Utah’s lawsuit, under a directive to increase drilling. “It’s all backed up by the amount of money that the state of Utah appropriated to support their lawsuit — $20 million that they didn’t have that last time,” Carroll added.
He doesn’t expect Republicans to sit around twiddling their thumbs, either. In 2017, the “Trump administration was pretty new to governing and the levers of power.” He expects in 2024 “we’re going to see, in the next two weeks, legislation that moves to privatize public lands.”
“We need to hear Republicans when they say, ‘Drill, baby drill,’” Carroll went on. “That has real consequences for federal public lands.”
That said, the U.S. EV maker also reported record fourth-quarter deliveries.
Tesla reported today that it had delivered 495,570 cars in the last three months of the year, and 1,789,226 in 2024 as a whole. That represents a decline in annual sales from 2023 — Tesla’s first annual decline in more than 10 years, back when the company’s deliveries were counted in the hundreds or single-digit thousands — although the fourth quarter figure is a record for quarterly deliveries.
Analysts polled by Bloomberg expected 510,400 deliveries for the fourth quarter, while Tesla had forecast around 515,000 deliveries to meet its “slight growth” goals. The company had cited “sustained macroeconomic headwinds” weighing on the broader electric vehicle market in its most recent investor letter, and again referred to “ongoing macroeconomic conditions” to explain the miss on deliveries. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Tesla deliveries stood at 484,507, with 1,808,581 for the year as a whole.
Going forward, Tesla buyers in the United States are likely to lose out on up to $7,500 in federal subsidies as the incoming Trump administration puts its stamp on energy and environmental policy. Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has supported ditching EV credits.
The below-expectations deliveries dragged on the stock, which traded down more than 4.5% in early trading Thursday. Tesla shares have otherwise been on a tear, rising around 75% in the last six months before today, with especially torrid performance following the 2024 United States presidential election.
The Chinese car company BYD is in a virtual tie with Tesla for annual battery electric vehicle sales, with 1,764,992 delivered in 2024, the company announced Wednesday. While Tesla’s 2024 sales confirm that the U.S. company maintains a narrow lead over BYD, the Chinese automaker’s sales are growing at a rapid clip — electric sales increased by over 12% for the year, compared to the slight fall in Tesla sales from 2023 to 2024.
While Tesla’s car business appears to have stalled to some extent — though it was buoyed by the release of a new model, the Cybertruck, which is already the third best-selling electric vehicle in the United States — the company’s energy storage business is another story. The company said that in the fourth quarter of last year it had deployed 11 gigawatt-hours of storage, and 31.4 gigawatt-hours in the year as a whole. If Tesla’s deployment rate in 2025 merely matched its fourth quarter rate, it would mean 40% annual growth.