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Who thought that was a good idea?
In an altogether distressing debate in which climate was far from a main focus, the two candidates did have one notable exchange regarding the Paris Agreement. The 2015 treaty united most countries around the world in setting a goal to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, with 1.5 degrees as the ultimate target.
After Trump initially dodged a question about whether he would take action to slow the climate crisis, he then briefly noted “I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air. And we had it. We had H2O.”
While it is true that there was H2O during Trump’s presidency, Biden responded by criticizing Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement. “I immediately [re]joined, because if we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, at any one point, there’s no way back,” Biden said. “The only existential threat to humanity is climate change. And he didn’t do a damn thing about it.”
But according to a poll conducted last November by Heatmap, only 35% of Americans say they are at least “somewhat familiar” with the Paris Agreement at all, perhaps making it an odd choice to anchor the debate’s one exchange around climate. By contrast, the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature piece of climate legislation, didn’t come up once. (Not that they’re that familiar with the IRA, either.) Solar, wind, carbon emissions — all terms that resonate with Americans, none of which were mentioned.
Of his decisions to leave the Paris Agreement in 2017, Trump claimed, “The Paris Accord was going to cost us $1 trillion,” while it would cost China, Russia, and India “nothing.”
The $1 trillion number actually appears to be a discount on Trump’s previously cited estimate. In his Rose Garden address announcing his decision to exit the agreement, he said that by 2040, compliance would entail a cost to the economy that would approach “$3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs,” citing a study conducted by NERA Economic Consulting.
According to the fact-checking website PolitiFact, the study’s authors were explicit that these projections are highly uncertain and do not take into account all the job gains and GDP growth that could be associated with the energy transition. PolitiFact also said NERA put forth a news release (which now appears to be unavailable online) stating that "the Trump administration selectively used results" from its study, and that “NERA’s study was not a cost-benefit analysis of the Paris Agreement, nor does it purport to be one.”
When Trump said that China, Russia, and India would not have financial commitments under the Paris Agreement, he was perhaps referencing the obligation (which the Paris Agreement reaffirmed) for wealthier nations like the U.S. to direct hundreds of billions of dollars to poorer nations to both aid their transition to clean energy and help them adapt to the impacts of climate change. It’s true that there’s controversy around whether China or India, which have giant (but still developing) economies, should either provide this funding or receive this funding. Russia, which joined the agreement in 2019, hasn’t really been a part of this conversation though.
In response to Trump’s defense of his decision to exit the agreement, Biden countered, “We were the only ones of consequence who were not members of the Paris Accord. How can we do anything if the United States can't get its pollution under control?” He said the U.S. had made significant progress on climate, and while it felt like a moment to, I don’t know, note the job growth from the administration’s investment in cleantech manufacturing (in predominantly red states), Biden instead cited the formation of the Climate Corps, a nice but thus-far modest fellowship program that puts young Americans to work fighting the climate crisis. Most of the public likely hasn’t heard of it, and Biden has been mostly quiet about it of late.
The exchange ended when Biden said, “We're moving in directions that are going to significantly change the elemental cause of pollution. But the idea that [Trump] claims that he has the biggest heart up here and is really concerned about pollution, and about climate, I've not seen any indication of that.”
And just like that, it was onto prescription drugs, who is better at golf, and Trump’s weight. You know, the usual debate stuff.
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Tristan Abbey would come to Washington from a Texas think tank that argues peak oil is way off base.
Donald Trump’s pick to run the Energy Information Administration works for a think tank that denies the existence of an energy transition.
The Energy Information Administration is the nation’s primary energy fuel and power forecasting agency. Since its inception in 1977, EIA has become a go-to source of data for many U.S. businesses, analysts, and policymakers alike. The agency’s previous administrators have been relatively apolitical academics and industry experts, including under the first Trump administration, whose EIA administrator came to the role from a faculty position at Rice University. The office’s current acting administrator is Stephen Nalley, who was appointed deputy administrator by Trump in 2018 after serving in various other roles at the agency.
Last month, however, the president quietly nominated a new EIA administrator who may represent a new direction for the agency. Tristan Abbey is an energy consultant and a senior fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics, a think tank founded last year by a conservative policy outfit, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The group argues against the concept of “peak oil,” the notion that the world will one day hit a maximum level of oil demand as it transitions to other (presumably more climate-friendly) fuels.
“There has never been a more critical time for sober-minded, fact-based, emotion-free perspectives in energy domains,” the think tank proudly declares on its About webpage. “The U.S. and European governments, along with many U.S. states, are embarking on the biggest industrial spending program in history, all directed in the pursuit of an ‘energy transition’ with the goal to rapidly replace hydrocarbons that currently supply 80% of the world’s energy. Why are the stakes so high? ‘Transitions’ of such scale have never occurred. And energy is fundamental to everything in civilization.”
Abbey was previously director of energy and environment at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019 under Trump 1.0, and was also chief economist for the GOP on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, boasting in a CV that his role included successfully repealing a federal oil export ban. Per that CV, he previously worked for Clarium Capital Management and Founders Fund, two hedge funds founded by GOP financier Peter Thiel. Abbey was also on the Trump 1.0 transition team, according to his LinkedIn.
Today, Abbey also works with the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a D.C. petroleum research organization, and recently stepped away from working at the Trump-affiliated America First Policy Institute, according to an ethics disclosure posted online.
Abbey’s work at the NCEA provides insight into the views he may bring to the top of EIA.
His biggest achievement at the think tank was authoring a report declaring that global gas demand will remain strong. “[T]he broad directional arrows are distinguishable: for the foreseeable future, the world will need far more electricity and more industrial energy, and a significant portion of that will require natural gas,” the report said. “The federal government never decided to become the world’s largest LNG exporter, but it did allow private companies to make that happen. The decision that it can make today is to preserve that achievement.”
On a webinar about the report, Abbey called on the U.S. to take steps to increase domestic natural gas consumption and find new ways to use LNG in various consumer products and industrial processes. “Is there something that is holding U.S. industry back from using more natural gas than it would otherwise?,” he asked.
The NCEA is a key player in a highly consequential but wonky debate in Washington about whether the U.S. should try and put thumb screws onto the International Energy Agency, a world power and fuel forecasting body overseen by the OECD, an international body to which the U.S. is the single largest contributor.
The IEA has previously predicted “peak oil” may occur before 2030 — one of many predictions that have led some Republicans in Washington to declare the IEA is no longer impartial and a “cheerleader” for renewable energy. These Republicans have been led by Senator John Barrasso, one of the lawmakers who will oversee Abbey’s nomination. Another fan of this view is Kathleen Sgamma, Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Land Management, who cited the NCEA to call on U.S. policymakers to pressure the IEA into “meaningful reform” of its forecasting about the energy transition. The op-ed was first reported by E&E News’ Scott Waldman.
How does Abbey feel about the war on the IEA? We’ll find out at his confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled. We’ve asked Republicans on the committee for an update on when that’ll happen and we will let you know once we find out. Given they’re still working through other more high-profile nominees, that’ll take a while.
Microsoft is canceling data center leases, according to a Wall Street analyst.
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing another TD Cowen shock.
The whole spectrum of companies connected to artificial intelligence — the companies that design the chips, that supply the power, that make the generation equipment — shuddered Wednesday when the brokerage released another note from analysts pointing to evidence that Microsoft was giving up on its data center leases.
“Microsoft has both (1) walked away from +2GW of capacity in both the U.S. and Europe in the last six months that was in process to be leased, and (2) has both deferred and canceled existing data center leases in both the U.S. and Europe in the last month,” the analysts wrote.
Microsoft is one of the biggest players in the artificial intelligence industry, with its near-$14 billion investment in OpenAI and acommitment to spend $80 billion on data center capacity this year.
The company is pulling back, the TD Cowen analysts said, because it had decided not to support incremental increases in training workloads for OpenAI models. Shares in Nvidia, the chip designer that’s become one of the most valuable companies in the world on the back of optimism about artificial intelligence, are down 7% since market close Tuesday, while shares in the power companies Vistra and Constellation are down 9% and 7% respectively. GE Vernova, which makes turbines for gas-fired power plants, is down 9%.
Much of the power industry saw huge increases in their stock prices in 2024, as investors bet on increased demand for electricity from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification. But 2025 so far has been a year of mild expectations.
In February, Cowen analysts issued a similar note warning that Microsoft was pulling back on some of its data center leases. And in January, of course, many of the AI and energy stocks that had been soaring 2024dropped when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released an open source model comparable in performance to the state of the art in the United States but that required far less computing power to train.
The Cowen analysts were hardly doomy about AI and data center construction, writing that Google and Meta may be “backfilling” the capacity left behind by Microsoft as they seek to expand their own data center footprints.
But the case for across the board optimism may be slightly dimming across the sector. CoreWeave, which buys Nvidia chips and operates data centers, has had to reduce the amount of money its seeking to raise in its planned initial public offering to $1.5 billion, from the over $4 billion it was looking to get from investors earlier in the IPO process, Bloomberg reported. Nvidia, an investor in CoreWeave and its most important supplier, will be “anchoring” the IPO, kicking in $250 million.
The tax agency reopened its online portal to allow dealerships to register sales retroactively.
As recently as last month, some electric vehicle buyers were running into roadblocks when they tried to claim the EV tax credit on their 2024 returns. Their claims were rejected, it turned out, because the dealership where they bought their EV never registered the sale with the Internal Revenue Service.
On Wednesday, the IRS instituted a fix: It reopened the online portal for dealerships to report these sales retroactively.
The confusion all started with a major change the IRS made to the EV tax credit program last year. Previously, all dealers had to do was give the buyer a “time of sale” report that they could submit to the IRS come tax season. But as of 2024, dealerships were expected to register every EV sale that was eligible for the tax credit through this new online portal. Not only that, they had to do so within three days of the sale. The portal would not allow entries dated more than three days post-sale.
The IRS and the National Automobile Dealers Association did outreach to educate dealerships about the changes, but many were apparently still unaware of the requirements — some never even made an online account. Customers were similarly ignorant of the intricacies of the process. Many received time of sale reports and thought they were all set. But in January, when they began trying to claim the credit on their taxes for the previous year, they were surprised to receive an error message saying that their EV was not registered with the IRS. Some tried to get their dealerships to register the sale retroactively, but the IRS portal didn’t allow for it.
President Trump has vowed to kill the EV tax credit, and Congress is just now beginning to hammer out the legislation that could execute his wishes. In light of that, and given the relative chaos at the IRS caused by Elon Musk’s “efficiency” department demanding access to private taxpayer information and laying off thousands of IRS employees, it was unclear whether the Treasury Department would do anything to help these unlucky EV buyers seeking their refunds. The Treasury did not respond to multiple inquiries from Heatmap in February.
The Dealers Association also never responded to multiple inquiries from Heatmap about the issue. But in a notice to dealerships this week, first reported by NPR, the trade group said the IRS planned to roll out an update to the portal on Wednesday to allow for sales made in 2024 to be submitted.
If any of this has made you nervous about getting an EV this year, remember that you have another, safer option for claiming the tax credit. Instead of claiming it on your taxes in 2026, you can transfer it to your dealer, who can take it off the sale price of the car on the spot. Just make sure they know about the online portal!