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If you haven’t already, get to know the “border adjustment.”
While climate policy has become increasingly partisan, there also exists a strange, improbably robust bipartisan coalition raising support for something like a carbon tax.
There are lots of different bills and approaches floating out there, but the most popular is the “border adjustment” tax, basically an emissions-based tariff, which, as a concept, is uniquely suited to resolve two brewing trade issues. One is the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which will force essentially everybody else to play by its carbon pricing system. Then there’s the fact that China powers its world-beating export machine with coal, plugged into an electrical grid that is far dirtier than America’s.
For Republicans, some kind of tax on imports would be a way of leveling the playing field in the face of what are, to their minds, punitive environmental restrictions on American energy producers and manufacturers. For Democrats, a border adjustment could be appealing both as a way to favor American manufacturing and as a way of encouraging other countries to clean up their grids.
There are currently two carbon border adjustment bills bouncing around the Senate, one introduced by Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy — whose record on climate is far friendlier than many of his GOP colleagues’ — and the other by Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the most active and vocal Democratic senators on environmental issues.
In a hearing on the challenge of load growth before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Cassidy raised the issue of China’s energy mix, arguing that coal plants on the country’s Pacific coast mean at more pollutants in the United States.
“To the degree that our energy policy increases the cost of energy, and therefore encourages someone to move to China, we are actually worsening global greenhouse gas emissions because we’re increasing consumption of Chinese coal-fired electricity as opposed to clean-burning U.S. electricity,” Cassidy said during the hearing.
“Right on, brother,” the committee’s chair, Democrat Joe Manchin, responded.
Cassidy and Manchin both represent states that are major fossil fuel producers and are no one’s ideas of climate hawks — although they both support some version of permitting reform and Manchin’s was a crucial vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act — they nevertheless represent two pillars of the idiosyncratic alliance that could get a border adjustment tax over the line. Add in Democratic climate hawks who are also interested in permitting reform such as Whitehouse and California Representative Scott Peters and Republicans who are, in their own way, open to some kind of climate change policy, including Cassidy and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, and this thing starts to look possible.
The first step would be devising a way to calculate how clean the U.S. electricity system is compared to the rest of the world — and lo, there’s a bill for that too: the PROVE IT Act, which passed out of the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee in January.
That bill, introduced by Delaware Democrat Chris Coons and North Dakota Republican Kevin Cramer, would mandate the Department of Energy measure and report the emissions intensity for 17 categories of products (including fossil fuels) in the United States and a host of other countries. The intent of the bill is to demonstrate that, in many cases, U.S. manufacturing is cleaner than many other countries’, especially China, at least when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.
The bill managed to win not just from Senators on both sides of the aisle, but also from industry groups that are often somewhere from skeptical to outright opposed to emissions restrictions. These include the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (The American Petroleum Institute is even gathering up a list of House Republicans who could support a version of the bill in that chamber, reported E&E News.) The bill has also been endorsed by a host of more centrist and right-leaning climate and environmental groups, including the Climate Leadership Council and Third Way, a moderate Democratic group.
Armed with the data from the PROVE IT Act, explained the Bipartisan Policy Center's Xan Fishman, the U.S. would be “able to use that in trade negotiations, or with a new border carbon policy.”
The time for the PROVE IT Act and then a border adjustment bill may be this year, Fishman told me, citing bipartisan support for the idea — or else sometime next year, when many of the Trump tax cuts expire, setting off a scramble for revenue to pay for extending popular tax breaks.
“When you have a big giant tax bill where you’re extending or creating new tax credits and you’re looking for revenue to offset that,” Fishman said, suddenly a border adjustment could look pretty handy.
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It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Departments of the Treasury and the Interior to review their treatment of wind and solar, part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill — the same bill that also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to a series of subsequent orders by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that effectively froze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7. A NextEra spokesperson provided me a statement from the company after this story’s publication saying it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.”
This article was updated after publication to include a statement from NextEra.
A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.
A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.