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Voters don’t hate clean energy, but they also don’t want to work for it.
The re-election of Donald Trump all but assures that the next four years of climate policy will have to unfold at the local level. With a climate change denier who previously wreaked havoc on longstanding environmental regulations, opened wildlife refuges to drilling, and put the U.S. at odds with its international partners now set to return to the White House in January, the country will almost certainly fall far short of its 2030 emission reduction targets. But state and local policies can still achieve meaningful progress on their own: On Wednesday morning, green organizers like Climate Cabinet were already stressing that “it will now be up to state leaders to hold the line against Trump and to ensure continued progress toward clean energy.”
Will Americans defend and advance that progress, though? The results of several climate-related ballot measures that were put to vote Tuesday night are giving mixed signals.
On the one hand, there were a number of victories worth celebrating. Most significantly, Washington voters confirmed their state’s cap-and-invest carbon trading program, which pumps millions of dollars into local transit, environmental, and decarbonization projects. Voters across the country also signed off on creating climate- and conservation-related bonds and funds, including in Honolulu, Louisiana, Jefferson County, Iowa, Minnesota, and (likely) the state of California. Local transit-related measures also, on the whole, had a good night.
But there were some concerning rejections, too. Two counties on the southern Oregon coast expressed overwhelming (though non-binding) opposition to offshore wind development in their region, with some 80% of voters in Curry County signaling their objection. Two-thirds of voters in Berkeley, California — one of the most liberal cities in the country — also rejected what would have been a first-in-the-nation tax on natural gas in large buildings. In Washington, early results on an initiative that is still too close to call show voters on track to approve a measure that would bar cities, towns, and the state from “prohibiting, penalizing, or discouraging” gas appliances in buildings — “discouraging” being the operative, ill-defined, and all-encompassing word — threatening Seattle’s 2050 net-zero emissions target.
South Dakotans also rejected a bill that would have smoothed the permitting process for a carbon dioxide pipeline that would carry CO2 from ethanol plants to an injection well in North Dakota as a means of dealing with planet-warming emissions. Though CO2 pipelines are controversial and have “strange politics,” as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has written, the citizen-led backlash was often couched in the language of opposing out-of-state interests who were “going to make a buck from the future energy transition.”
My read of the night’s referenda and ballot measures is that voters largely seem willing to do the passive work of supporting climate and environmental policy (for instance by directing the use of property taxes or reconfirming a law already in place) and less willing to voluntarily take on some of the burden themselves, in the form of hosting new development in their communities or opting into transitions away from climate-polluting fuels. This isn’t terribly surprising — local battles over the energy transition are common and frequent enough that we have a whole weekly newsletter here at Heatmap addressing them — but it also suggests that there isn’t nearly enough momentum to prevent potentially catastrophic backsliding under four more years of Trump.
There is good news, though. Local policy is often nimbler and more responsive than state- or federal-level policy. It’s also something anyone can get involved in, and there is presently a wide-open opportunity to convince Americans to embrace a clean energy economy and build things. The seemingly total failure of the current administration to capitalize on the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act, however, does mean that climate, transit, environmental justice, decarbonization, and conservation organizers and activists will have their work cut out for them in the next years to come.
But it isn’t impossible, even if it is uphill sledding. As Climate Cabinet’s Caroline Spears put it in her Wednesday morning note, “It’s time to go back to our roots, dig deep, and rebuild our democracy and climate progress from the local level up.”
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Re-meet the once and future director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.
President-elect Donald Trump spent the Friday evening before Thanksgiving filling out nearly the rest of his Cabinet. He plans for his Treasury secretary to be a hedge fund manager who’s called the Inflation Reduction Act “the Doomsday machine for the deficit”; he’s named a vaccine safety skeptic to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and his pick to head the Department of Labor is a Republican congresswoman who may want to ease the enforcement of child labor rules if confirmed.
And — in one of the most consequential moves yet for America’s standing in the fight to mitigate climate change — Trump also named Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The decision comes as no surprise — Vought served as deputy director of the OMB under Trump in 2018 and took over the top job in 2019, serving until the end of Trump’s first presidency. The strategic communications group Climate Power had been sounding the alarm on his potential return to the office since this spring, which included sharing their research on him with me.
Unlike many Trump administration nominees, who tend to be loyalists with limited experience in the offices they’re appointed to oversee, Vought is noteworthy for having thought long and hard about how to “purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me when I covered Vought’s agenda earlier this year.
Vought plans to do so mainly by reinstating Schedule F, a job classification that would designate at least 50,000 career civil servants as “at-will” political employees, including climate scientists National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others who sit on committees like the Clean Air Scientific Advisory. In Vought’s words in his chapter of Project 2025, “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” (In a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, the pair speculated about being able to “fire them all.”) Vought already tried this once, at the end of Trump’s first term, and Biden swiftly reversed it upon taking office.
Beyond gutting America’s scientific corps, possibly for generations, if confirmed, Vought will immediately make his presence in the Trump administration felt, having spent the past few years secretly drafting “hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans,” according to reporting by CNN and based on undercover video released by the Centre for Climate Reporting, which recorded a candid conversation with former OMB director about his plans under false pretenses. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought told his interviewers. “And we are working doggedly on that,” including by “destroying their agencies’ notion of independence.”
Though Trump (and his campaign) tried to deflect the influence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 roadmap for his presidency, insisting he is an independent thinker not beholden to anyone, the president-elect’s appointment of Vought and other Project 2025 authors such as Brendan Carr, Tom Homan, and John Ratcliffe to powerful posts in his administration renders those denials specious, to say the least. More crucially, it suggests a certain intellectual deferral to Vought, enthroning him as one of the key architects of Trumpism 2.0. Through his Christian nationalist group, Center for Renewing America, Vought has spread his framework for solidifying executive power (and eliminating its checks and obstacles) throughout Washington’s right-wing intellectual circles, giving him a powerful base of support.
All this from the OMB, though — one of the, let’s face it, more boring offices of government? As Vought knows, however: If you control the budget, then you do everything.
Meet Scott Bessent.
Donald Trump ended weeks of Billions-esque drama on Wall Street and Palm Beach by finally settling late Friday on a nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent.
In contrast to the quick and instinctive picks for major posts like secretary of defense, secretary of state, and attorney general (albeit, two picks for that job), Trump deliberated on the Treasury pick, according to reports, cycling through candidates including Bessent, long the frontrunner for the job, his transition chief Howard Lutnick, private equity titan Marc Rowan, and former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh.
Bessent will almost immediately face a challenge that the markets have been putting towards Trump since even before his election: can he deliver what investors crave (tax cuts. deregulation), while smoothing out volatility and possible inflation stemming from the tariffs and mass deportations that Trump has promised to implement? Investors already have slightly cooled on the Trump trade and expect that the interest rate cuts kicked off in September will slow.
Bessent has long advised Trump on the economy and is not unaware of these challenges, but his way around them is to embrace much of Trump’s existing agenda in what the Wall Street Journal has described as a “3-3-3” plan, where deficits are cut in half to 3% of gross domestic product, growth is kicked up to 3%, and oil production rises by three million barrels a day, a goal that Continental Resources chief executive and informal Trump advisor Harold Hamm has cast doubt on due to geologic constraints.
“Scott has long been a strong advocate of the America First Agenda,” Trump wrote on Truth Social announcing the pick. “Scott will support my Policies that will drive U.S. Competitiveness, and stop unfair Trade Imbalances, work to create an Economy that places Growth at the forefront, especially through our coming World Energy Dominance.”
While energy policy will seemingly be handled by the nominee for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and the newly formed National Energy Council, fiscal policy and tariffs will likely play a major role in determining if Trump’s vision of a more productive and less constrained oil and gas sector can be realized, whether it’s by tariffs possibly leading to increases in the price of steel or possible retaliatory duties on American energy exports. Higher interest rates due to tariffs or an overheated economy could deter investment in energy, renewable or not.
One of the Treasury Department’s most important jobs is managing the nation’s debt profile by deciding what kind of debt to sell in order to meet the government’s immense borrowing needs. Bessent criticized the current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a Wall Street Journal essay for having “distorted Treasury markets by borrowing more than $1 trillion in more-expensive shorter-term debt compared with historical norms.” He suggested that selling more longer-term debt “may increase longer-term interest rates and will need to be deftly handled.” Higher long-term rates are more likely to feed through to a higher cost of capital for investors, which will likely hurt renewable energy developers more than their fossil fuel competitors due to how much of the cost of renewables comes up front.
In another ominous signal for the nascent climate economy, Bessent also suggested to the Financial Times that the Inflation Reduction Act could be one area where cuts to the federal budget could be found, telling the newspaper that it was “the Doomsday machine for the deficit.”
This would be the second time the U.S. has exited the climate treaty — and it’ll happen faster than the first time.
As the annual United Nations climate change conference reaches the end of its scheduled programming, this could represent the last time for at least the next four years that the U.S. will bring a strong delegation with substantial negotiating power to the meetings. That’s because Donald Trump has once again promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty adopted at the same climate conference in 2015, which unites nearly every nation on earth in an effort to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.
Existentially, we know what this means: The loss of climate leadership and legitimacy in the eyes of other nations, as well as delayed progress on emissions reductions. But tangibly, there’s no precedent for exactly what this looks like when it comes to U.S. participation in future UN climate conferences, a.k.a. COPs, the official venue for negotiation and decision-making related to the agreement. That’s because when Trump withdrew the U.S. from Paris the first time, the agreement’s three year post-implementation waiting period and one-year withdrawal process meant that by the time we were officially out, it was November 2020 and Biden was days away from being declared the winner of that year’s presidential election. That year’s conference was delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic, by which point Biden had fully recommitted the U.S. to the treaty.
Now that the waiting period no longer applies, the U.S. could exit as soon as January 2026, meaning COP31 would be the first where it’s not party to the agreement. The U.S. could still attend the conference as long as it retains membership in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that oversees the meetings, and it could even attend Paris Agreement-related meetings, though for these it would be relegated to “observer status,” with no decision-making power. The U.S. would not be required to submit updated emissions targets and progress reports as prescribed by Paris, and would have much weaker financial commitments to developing countries.
Todd Stern, Obama’s former U.S. climate envoy, told me decisions at COP are essentially made by consensus, meaning that “if you're a player like the U.S., or you're a player like any of the big guys, and you say, We can't do this, that's going to push the negotiation one way or another.” Post-pullout, the U.S. won’t be able to throw that kind of weight around. “But that doesn't necessarily mean, when you get down into the nitty gritty of negotiation, that the people from the U.S. will have views that are uninteresting,” Stern told me, indicating that the American delegation could still make suggestions and share the country’s overall perspective.
Stern noted that after the U.S. announced its first withdrawal from Paris, it kept showing up at COP, with lower-ranking government officials continuing to provide input even as most political appointees stayed home. “The U.S. kept attending and speaking and having ideas because the U.S. team is very skilled. They're smart people who’ve done it a lot,” he told me. Though the delegations Trump sent to COP were notably smaller, less influential, and more fossil fuel-forward than Obama’s and Biden’s representatives, the U.S. kept contributing, even helping to finalize the Paris rulebook in 2018, which codifies detailed guidelines that make the high-level agreement actionable.
Of course the natural next question is, why would Trump pull out again if his first administration seemed to feel that a seat at the table was worthwhile? Beyond the obvious political symbolism around deprioritizing decarbonization, this was something Stern couldn’t quite explain, either. The official statements on COP from that time reiterate that “the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as soon as it is eligible to do so,” while also stating that the country “is participating in ongoing negotiations, including those related to the Paris Agreement, in order to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects U.S. interests.”
Nonsensical as these dual goals may be, this time the U.S. simply won’t have the option to prioritize both — it’s one or the other. But hey, maybe ExxonMobil will get its way and Trump will stay in the agreement after all.