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What parliamentary elections in France and the U.K. mean for everyone else.
While America has been distracted by its suddenly-very-real upcoming election, two other important political stories have been unfolding across the pond. The results of last week’s parliamentary votes in France and the United Kingdom have the power to sway global climate policy — and they might even contain lessons for the U.S. about the rise (or fall) of the far-right.
In June, French President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections, and the far-right National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen was widely expected to achieve a majority in the country’s 577-seat National Assembly. Instead, the New Popular Front, a hastily-formed alliance between the hard left, Greens, and Socialists, came out on top in a runoff, followed by the centrist Ensemble (which includes Macron’s Renaissance party) and the National Rally in a distant third. Because no party won the 289 seats needed to gain control of the chamber, the left and center now have to form a coalition government, which means ideological compromise — something that’s distinctly un-French. “We're not the Germans, we're not the Spanish, we're not the Italians — we don't do coalitions,” one French political commentator told Sky News.
Climate change wasn’t a big theme, but the National Rally’s proposals certainly had experts nervous. The party tapped into simmering discontent among some demographics — farmers, in particular — who feel unfairly burdened by new regulations in service of the European Union’s ambitious agenda, known as the Green Deal, including a goal to cut the bloc’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. If it had won, the party planned to dismantle France’s energy efficiency rules, roll back a 2035 ban on new gas-powered cars, block new wind farms, do away with low-emission zones, and transform electricity trade. France is already the EU’s third biggest emitter, and the EU as a whole is responsible for about 9% of global CO2 emissions, although emissions have been falling, especially in the energy sector.
As the dust settles in France, the biggest danger to climate policy now is stalemate. The lackluster results for the far right are no doubt a relief to the climate conscious. “We have avoided a catastrophe,” Alain Fischer, president of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, told Nature. The winning NFP, for its part, backs the Green Deal’s emissions targets and wants France to become “the European leader in renewable energies” through offshore wind power and the development of hydroelectric power. It also calls for the “creation of an international court for climate and environmental justice.” But the next several months are likely to be chaotic as the parties tussle over what the government should look like, and there is no deadline for these decisions to be made. The leadership limbo could bring political paralysis at a time when the EU is just getting its bearings following bloc-wide parliamentary elections — which, by the way, saw the Greens lose seats in lots of places. In response, the non-profit Climate Group put out a statement calling for the French government to “commit to safeguarding the EU Green Deal and ensuring a sustainable future for the continent.” The good news is that a large majority of EU voters want to see more climate action.
The Labour Party won the general election in a landslide, bringing an end to 14 years of Conservative Party rule. During his tenure, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak watered down key net-zero strategies, delayed a ban on new combustion engine vehicles, scrapped energy efficiency standards, and approved a large new oil field in the North Sea. His party also pulled low-emission zones into the culture wars in a desperate attempt to win over voters. None of this played to his advantage. According to Desmog, two-thirds of the Conservative members of Parliament who were anti-net zero lost their seats, including the former energy secretary. “With a clear mandate for climate action,” wrote climate change think tank E3G, “all eyes are now on Labour to deliver.”
New Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to turn the U.K. into a “clean energy superpower” by doubling onshore wind, tripling solar power, and quadrupling offshore wind by 2030. He also plans to upgrade the grid to speed the rollout of clean energy projects, while at the same time denying new licenses for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. He wants to establish a publicly owned clean energy firm and decarbonize the power sector by 2030. And he plans to reinstate the 2030 ban on new gas cars. The goals are lofty, and meeting them will “extensive change across every sector of the economy,” wrote Carbon Brief. But Labour seems to be wasting little time. Days after taking power, the new government scrapped a ban on onshore wind farms that had been in place since 2015 and which the new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves called “absurd.”
The U.K. accounts for about 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That might be paltry compared to, say, the U.S. (13.5%) or China (32%), but it has a chance now to use its global influence and proximity to Europe to keep the needle moving in the right direction. That goes especially if it is nudged by the Green party, which surprised everyone by quadrupling its number of seats in Parliament (albeit to just four). As The New York Times noted, Britain is where the industrial revolution began, so “the speed and scale of Britain’s energy transition is likely to be closely watched by other industrialized countries and emerging economies alike.”
What’s clear from both of these cases is that people really care about climate policy and are willing to vote with that in mind. That can swing either way, though, depending on the particular set of policies and how they affect the electorate. As extreme weather intensifies, however, it may become more difficult for far-right parties to minimize the significance of climate change. “We need to recognize that extreme weather is politicizing people against this climate denial,” said Paul Dickinson, founder of CDP, an emissions disclosure platform, and co-host of the podcast Outrage + Optimism. “It is the Achilles heel of the extreme right that they’re opposed to the realities of extreme weather. That’s how I think if we’re organized and disciplined, we will defeat them.”
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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.